Camp Waiuta 2018

Last week Room 5 spent two nights at Waiuta, a ghost town located in the hills between Ahaura and Reefton. Waiuta was once a thriving gold mining town after a rich seam of gold bearing quartz was found there in 1905. The town was abandoned in 1951 after one of the mine shafts collapsed. Now, very little of the town is left.

Have a look at our presentations on our individual blogs to find out more about Waiuta and what we did on our camp. As always, we love to receive your comments!

Top Team

Last Friday Room 5, along with Room 2 and the Year 6 students, went to Runanga School to take part in the Top Team challenge. Everyone had a great time and lots of people ended up soaking wet. Everyone also learned some things about how to work well as a team!

Midland Line Athletics

On Monday we took part in the Midland Line Athletics competition along with four other small schools from the area. After the stormy weekend we weren't sure if the weather would be fine enough for the event to go ahead, but it was mostly fine with only a short shower in the middle of the day.
We had practised lots and everyone who went in Room 5 made their best effort in distance running, sprints, high jump, long jump, discus and shot put. Some people even made it through to West Coast Athletics, which is quite an achievement. Good luck to Sophie, Tahlia, Isabel, Jake and Jackson who will be representing Year 5 at West Coast Athletics next Wednesday.

Pet Day 2018

The whole school had yet another great Animal and Produce Day (otherwise known as Pet Day) on the first Friday of the new term, with most people able to bring a pet on the day. After judging and the pet parade there were a variety of workshops, including plasticene creations, cupcake decorating and sand gardens. The weather stayed fine and everyone had a lovely time.
Here are some photographs of some of us and our pets. Have a look at our individual blogs to see what we wrote about our pets for our pet projects and to see some more photographs.

Kapa Haka Festival

 Together with students from Room 6, Room 5 students competed in the Kapa Haka Festival at Hokitika in the last week of term.  Have a look at the video of their performance:

Reducing Plastic in Awahono School

After reading a School Journal article about how Collingwood was the first place in New Zealand to ban plastic bags (all the way back in 2005), we wondered how we could make a difference in our school. We noticed that our classroom bins all had plastic bin liners that were thrown away with the rubbish each day, so we all wrote to our principal about this to try and persuade her to do something about it. Here is one of our letters:

Dear Mrs Wallace,

All over the school we use plastic bags for bin liners. In my opinion we should not use them for bin liners. I have three good reasons why we should not use plastic bags for bin liners.

Firstly, I strongly believe we should not use plastic bags for bin liners because we usually only put dry paper and food packaging in most of the classroom bins. It is not wet materials or slimy contents going into the bin, so there is no reason for using plastic bags for bin liners.

Secondly, I think we should not use plastic bags for bin liners because it would save money. We could use the money for other things like school books or stationery. Guess what? We use two thousand plastic bags a year just at our school. THAT’S CRAZY! Think of the savings we could make. We could save at least one hundred dollars a year on plastic bags.

Thirdly, we should not use plastic bags for bin liners. Two thousand get thrown away every year. That's fifty a week and ten a day just at our school. It all goes into landfill ruining the environment. If we don’t stop plastic from polluting our earth,  the world might just be a big pile of plastic floating in space. You know that plastic is a problem and we can do something about it here at school.

In conclusion, I think we should not use plastic bags as bin liners at school because we don't need them, it would save money, and it's good for the environment. I hope that you will make some changes at this school to help the environment.

.

Yours sincerely,

Amelia

Mrs Wallace read all our letters and then wrote
back to us, saying that she agreed with what we
had said and that as from Term 4 there would be
no more bin liners for dry rubbish in our
classrooms! Great result, Room 5.

We realise that this is a small change, but if we all make a small change to try to reduce the amount of plastic we use, all the small changes will add up to make a bigger change.

Plastic Ocean Collages