Sailing Recap

On Monday the 11th of November the year 6, 7 & 8's of Te - Kinga participated in the 'Have A Go Sailing' program.  I myself have been sailing before because of this program from previous years so I had some prior knowledge stored in my pocket.  When we arrived at the Yacht Club we were kindly greeted by Simon, the organizer of the whole program.  He taught us how to set up a yacht and how to sail.  I knew this stuff, so it was kind of a revision.  After we suited up we jumped into the water.  One person had to be an "Anchor" and the other had to put the trailer back.  My sailing buddy was Bridget, here's her blog http://lakebrunnerbridgetr.blogspot.com/( shameless plug for her ).  Bridget and I were a bit anxious at times when our boat started tipping.  Most of the time we were screaming at each other because the boat was either going to capsize ( well we thought ) or we were just having too much fun in general.  Whilst gliding on the water we heard two squeaky squeals, we looked around and discovered that those squeals were coming out of the mouths of Jakob & Kyle.  My favourite parts of the whole experience was walking on the underwater jetty and jumping off, screaming at Bridget, chucking water at other people with the bailer and sailing in general.  If you have the opportunity to go sailing I suggest you go for it because it's a great experience to get involved in if you haven't gone sailing before.

Miranda Jane Caird Art Reflection

Lake Brunner School are learning how to incorporate Miranda Jane Caird's artwork style into theirs by creating a masterpiece.  We all got to video call Miranda as a whole school.  She gave us interesting art tips and answers to the questions we asked.  Weeks later each class was assigned to do a Miranda Jane Caird related artwork.  In order to make it look slightly like her style we had to add black lines.  The steps to make this type of art is quite simple.  1st step was to gently draw everything with pencil.  2nd step was to outline the parts you want to be black in chalk.  3rd step is to pastel everything up, but in my case I paste-led the mountains and water, I left the sky and watercoloured it.  4th step is to dye.  To dye we had to get ink and brush it against, lightly dab it and let it dry.  We placed all the finished artwork on the wall for display. 

Science Pendulum Art Report

Title: Pendulum Art   By: Bridget, Tara, Mary & Elsie 

Aim/Hypothesis: We thought that it would look like how it looked on the video. We also thought that it would be easy and we would get it first try.

Method: First we got 2 chairs and then we put a 1 meter ruler and tied it  to the 2 chairs after that we got some string and a paper cup and tied that to the 1 meter ruler. We put a hole in the bottom of the cup so the paint would come out then we mixed pink and blue in the cup with someone holding a piece of paper at the bottom of the cup so the paint wouldn't come out. We had some newspaper at the bottom of the the good paper that we were going to use. After that then we swung the cup on to the paper and it turned out like this.  

Results:  On our first attempt the cup was a foot away from the ground.  It was quite messy and unorganized, the string was every and didn’t end up like the ones in the videos.  Once we let go of the string to let it swing and do it’s thing, it just ended up doing blotches of polka dots.  It wasn’t flowing properly and it ended up looking like a mess.  

Our second attempt was a little bit better, but wasn’t what we wanted.  It had the same problem as our last attempt, polka dot blotches and no improvement.  

For our third attempt we decided to change the pendulum by sticking a pencil through the cup and adding a bigger hole.  We secured the string to the ruler and it seemed to work wonders. We aced it at the third attempt. 

Our original idea was to keep it lower to the ground, but one of our team mates told me to put it up higher,  couldn’t do anything else but agree because that’s what makes a team. At least we tried different approaches.   

Conclusion: Overall in the end it turned looking pretty cool. It took a couple of tries to get it right but we got it in the end and it worked.  Next time to make it successful we should do the same process as third attempt, but make the hole slightly smaller.  

Mining West Coast History

Snow Camp Report

On Monday 19th of August Te-Kinga & Kotuku drove to Arthurs Pass.  As we reached our destination we unloaded all our luggage and parked it inside the Aurthurs Pass "lodge".  Gemma ( The Host ) gave us a safety lecture.  We then split into two groups that were divided between Te-Kinga & Kotuku.  Te-Kinga went to Temple Basin and Kotuku went to do a mini bird orienteering thing.  We learnt  more about the South Island, we went on a mini track loop which involved people throwing snow at one another.  Once we were all done with our activities, which took about 2 hours.  We then had lunch.  Lunch was what we had packed in our bags.  Those who wanted to could swap activities.  Kotuku didn't want to, some wanted to o the squawk squad.  Some Te-Kinga didn't particapate with the squawk squad, whereas there were only a little group remaining.  The two groups split into two.  I was in a small group consisting Cameron, Toby, Mackenzie, Abhi, Paul (Toby's Dad) & Daniel (Grace's Step-dad).   For dinner we had pizzas made by the parent helpers.  Dessert was it was self - sauced pudding.

Day 2 Highlights: We arrived at Cheeseman.  As we were waiting for the parents putting their chains on, some kids went outside to have a mini snow fight.  When we arrived at the Cheeseman day room, we hanged out there a bit.  We technically were on MT Cockayne, MT Cheesman was beside us.  Some of us hung out in the day room and just chilled there.  After fun and games Sam (Cheeseman Host) called us inside.

Day 3 Highlights:  Skiing and failing was really fun.  Saying goodbye to Cheeseman was sad-ish, but the views on the way back were gorgeous.  Car ride was energetic & fun.

P.M.I 

Positives: Snow fights, skiing, hanging out with friends, dessert.

Minuses: When I went up the T-Bar to atempt skiing down the slopes I couldn't stop myself or slow myself down, so my only option was to fall and land having my skis come off.
Interesting:  When I fell down pretty hard and my skis came off it didn't hurt one bit.

Job Interview: Jarred Klempel

Recently we have been interviewing a good amount of people and asked them about their job history etc.  We had the same questions laid out for all our guests, we added in some different questions too. With every person we interviewed there was a different answer.  Today we interviewed Jarred Klempel ( Zak & Cameron's Dad ) he gave us full answers to our questions.  He intrigued me because he went into depth with his job history.  He mentioned all of his jobs and the two that stood out the most were the air force job and when he worked on the Bumble & Friends Show where he had to blink the eye of a puppet fish. 

 

History Topic

Fair trade Learning

For our topic this term we have been delving deep into Fair Trade and what it's about.   Fair trade doesn't support companies that have child labour.  Fair Trade helps exporters, for instance if someone provided coffee beans for The Fair Trade Company then Fair Trade gives them a fair amount of money.   Sometimes Fair Trade build schools for children who need education, they also provide fresh water and food.  For our fair trade topic we have each been assigned to a sack.  We had the option if we wanted to be in groups or not, I decided to partner up with Elsie to create a poem.  Our stages throughout the process went like this: First we came up with a poem that was meaningful, then we came up with designs for the sacks, our third stage was to edit everything and see if there were any mistakes.  Our final stage was to get creating.  We laid out pieces of newspaper onto the lino in the corridor  because there wasn't enough space in the classroom.  We then dipped our cotton buds into the cup with Indian ink and carefully dabbed our way through the sack.  The process didn't take that long to complete, but we were still very careful with our work and it turned out looking really good in the end.  Overall I think that the fair trade topic was fun, next term for the class topic my suggestion is to either do an art inquiry or a music inquiry where you have to play a song and figure out the meaning behind it, for the art inquiry we could choose an artwork to get inspired by and make our "re-creation" or something that looks similar. 

Home links week 4

Home links week 2

Home Links

Nutritionist Experience

On Tuesday the 26th & Wednesday the 27th of March a Nutritionist from New World called Jessica Smaill came into our class and taught us how to read and compare food labels, what types of fats, sugars, sodium etc are healthy or unatural, basically she taught us about food in general.  We got taught  what food are occasional and everyday food, I found it very interesting and informative.  We had two sessions with Jessica before we went to New World.  The next day we went into town on Thursday the 28th of March.  We first drove to the Recreation Centre to either use the courts or go swimming, I decided to use the courts.  We were at the Rec Centre for about an hour.  After the Recreation Centre we then went to New World.  We were at New World to read and compare different food labels and write down the results on a piece of paper. There were 5 different types of categories including breads, breakfast cereals, bars, snacks, The hardest healthy type of food to find was surprisingly bars. We had the class split into groups of 5.  I finished early along with Jakob & Eden, we went to Jessica to let her know that we were finished.  She then gave us a challenge which was to go around New World to find an almost perfect & healthy sauce.  We successfully finished that by discovering two different sauces.  After everyone eventually finished their activity we went to the wine & beer area to gather around Jessica to say our thank yous, she then dissapeared into New World as we moved on to our other activity, which was to find ingrideints for our smoothies.  We split into groups once more.  Each group had a catagory out of the ingridents.  There was fruits & vege, milk, etc.  My group ended up with the fruit & vege, we were allowed to choose the fruit & vege that were going to be put into the smoothie. After about an hour or so at New World we went to the Dixon Park and had a little munch.  Last but not least we went to the library to read books that aren't in our library back at school.   After a fun filled day we had to go back to school in time for the bus.

What I learnt from this experience: I learnt how to read and compare labels on food.

How has this changed what I eat and drink: I think this experience has changed just a little bit as to what I eat and drink.  I'm eating more fruit then usual and drinking more water than usual.  I also read the food label at the back for curiosity and fun purposes.