Drug and Alcohol Education

This term the Year 7 and 8 students have been participating in a drug and alcohol education programme. The aim of this programme is to educate about the effects that drugs and alcohol can have on the body and hopefully minimize the associated issues that occur in teenage and adult life. So far we have learnt how positive and negative traits can be passed on through generations, especially those linked with addiction, and that as we grow older we need to make positive choices around this. This week we learnt how alcohol affects us. We all walked through an obstacle course normally and then we put on 'beer goggles'. These goggles warped our vision and made us feel what it might be like to be drunk. Although this was fun, we also learnt the negative impact this can have on us, such as injury, alcohol poisoning, poor judgement, organ damage, loss of memory and much more. It definitely pays to avoid it altogether!
Here is a video showing how the goggles affected our coordination and ability to walk in a straight line.

Vessel Challenge to carry coal

To start our Inquiry topic about ' The uses of Awa', we had to get creative. In partners or groups of 3 (no more) create a water vessel that will float for 1 minute and hold 6 bits of coal.

Use the materials provided to build your vessel

• Sticks
• Flax
• Paper
• Material
• Rubber bands
• Balloons

Some of us had success with our vessels holding the bits of coal easily, where some the coal fell of straight away. It was lots of fun and got us thinking about what we could do differently next time to ensure it floated and could hold the coal. Watch out next term as we are going to build rafts to hold us.

Blogging

This term we are revisiting how to write a quality blog post that reflects who we are as learners. We are aiming to write more in depth learning stories that explain what we are learning, how the task/DLO relates to it, how we feel our learning is going etc. We have learnt how important quality blogging can be for reading and writing improvement so need to step it up a bit. We have created a simple guide to help our class go into more depth but hopefully they wont need it for long. Feel free to use it if it helps you too.

SEVENS

We took a girls and boys team to the local Sevens tournament in Moerewa. For most of them it was the first time they had played sevens. The girls had to learn how to tackle, which they picked up easily. It was a great day with some fantastic games. Well done to everyone that participated.

Year 7 and 8 Basketball

We took 2 Year 7 and 8 basketball teams to a tournament in Waipapa. Most of them had never played basketball before and had to learn the rules and how to play. They all did so well and improved with each game. Well done guys.

Room 5 and 6 Carpool Karaoke

We were on assembly last week. We thought it would be fun to do edition 2 of Carpool Karaoke. We had 15 minutes in Mrs Henare's car to come up with our little snippet for the video. It was lots of fun, some of us had to do a few takes as we kept making mistakes. We didn't see it until assembly with the rest of the school and our sneaky teachers and the other teachers at our school had done their own and added them in. It was lots of fun.