Share the Road

Today we were lucky to have a group of truck drivers and managers come to school to talk to us about sharing the road with trucks. First we watched a presentation about trucks and how to be safe around them. We learnt that trucks take a lot longer to stop than cars because of how heavy they are, and that when you are around trucks you need to be able to see the driver's face or you are in their blind spot and they can't see you. We learnt how rocks get lodged in tyres and can flick out when driving, also that trucks create a lot of spray (on wet days) and wind when they drive past.

We got to hop into a huge logging truck and play with the air horn (they run out of air when the truck is not going so it didn't last long!) We also looked at where the blind spots were.
Thank you so much to the team for teaching us how to be safe around trucks. We learnt heaps!

Did you know that a logging truck weighs 50 tons, a standard car weighs 1 ton - so 50 cars weigh the same as 1 truck!

Fun Run 2018

This year we decided to change our annual cross country to a fun run. The running track was the same, but we added fun obstacles that students could choose to do if they wanted, or just run straight past if they wanted to be more competitive. We dressed in our house colours and invited our whanau to join in the run for 500 extra points. We had an excellent turn out, the best in years, and we all had an awesome time. Here are a few pictures from our day... so much mud!!

 

Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori Challenge

Te Reo kiriāhua kiriata

This week we have challenged our students to make a te reo selfie video where they share their likes and who they are. As teachers this meant we had to make one first to show them what we wanted. This was a tricky thing for us to do and we had to step our of our comfort zone, but we are pretty proud of what we have achieved.
We hope you enjoy. Look out for Room 5 and 6 sharing their kiriāhua kiriata next week.

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.

We were the Teachers.

We became the teachers at school the other day. We worked in a group of 3 or 4 to plan a shared book activity and a game to do with our junior students. We had lots of fun working with them and getting them to do some fun activities and learning.  We hoped they enjoyed it.