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

You've Got the Power!

The highlight of this week - or even this term - was a return visit to Awahono School by magician, El Gregoe. El Gregoe astounded us with his incredible illusions, magic tricks and skill as a ventriloquist, assisted by his collection of stunning tropical birds (including a blue macaw named Zazu), his dinosaur puppet named Seymore and a little grey guinea pig named Harviana. 
El Gregoe had some important messages about bullying and how to deal with it. One of his messages was to use your WITS: Walk away, Ignore it, Talk to someone, say Stop.  He also reminded us to always treat others the way we would like to be treated.

Visit from Jenny Sommervell

Today we were fortunate to have Jenny Sommervell in our school reading two of her picture books, The Day Dad Blew Up the Cowshed and The Eel Hunt. We  learned lots about how Jenny gets her ideas from real experiences and stories from childhood, and she also told us about her writing process. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to get a book to the publishing stage! Jenny told us that the most important thing is to get the story right first, then to think about choosing the right words to use. She also told us how important it is to have the characters encountering lots of problems because that is what makes the story interesting.  This is known as "torturing the characters"!

Symmetry

Room 5 worked in groups to draw and cut out shapes that were symmetrical. First we folded a square of paper in half, then we drew lines with a ruler to make different straight sided shapes with three sides, four sides and more than four sides. We cut in from the fold, so when the shape was cut out we could unfold the shape. The fold line went down the middle of the shape, and each side of the shape was exactly the same as the other side. The fold line is the line of symmetry. It divides the shape exactly in half.
We grouped our shapes according to how many sides there were. Here are some pictures of the finished work. Everyone had to explain what they were learning on their individual blog. They needed to explain the task and say a line of symmetry is.

Please visit individual blogs and give us feedback on how successfully you think we have explained our learning.

Fraction Art

In Room 5 we have started this term by working on fractions in our maths. We decided to do some art work using fractions.  We cut out circles in different colours, then we folded the circles into halves, quarters, eighths and sixteenths and use the fraction pieces to create an underwater collage.
Here are some pictures of us working on our collages. Have a look at our individual blogs to see our fraction creations!