Week 9 - Final skateboarding session

This week was our final chance to show off our skateboarding skills.  Over the past eight weeks we have had awesome sessions with our two skateboarding coaches Martin and Aidan.  Some of the things that we have picked up along the way are:

• how to balance and push ourselves on the skateboard
• how to take apart and reassemble a skateboard using teamwork
• how to turn both ways
• how to ride up and down ramps

Here are some photos of Manukau in action last week:

We have had so much fun and we are really sad to finish this adventure. Many of us have developed or strengthened our love of skateboarding through this.  We might even check out their holiday programme and look forward to having a go at this again soon.  

Please leave us a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment to find out more.

Week 6 - Pick a Path Stories

We have extended our narrative writing over the past two weeks to create pick a path stories.  This is where we have the traditional problem in a narrative story, but the audience gets the choice of two possible solutions.

To start with we had to sequence our ideas in a plan.  Here is an example of a completed plan from Dorothy.  This was a really visual way to organise our ideas.

From this we have worked on using google slides to create the pick a path options. We used a template that Mr Riceman made on our site.  It had a few errors in it which we found as we made links inside and we had to fix them up as we went.  Lily has almost got her story finished (just a few editing touches to go) and here it is below.

 Over the next week we will be finishing and posting these on our individual blogs.  Please investigate these further and give us some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback.  We really appreciate it!

Te Waka Ako - Our new classes

Wow, the wait is finally over!  We have moved into our new ILE buildings with the other two classes from the senior syndicate.  We had a stunning (but very chilly) morning celebration just over a week ago.  Our fabulous Kapa Haka group performed, we all joined together to sing, our local MP (and father of one of our students) Michael Wood spoke and officially opened Te Waka Ako - The Canoe of Learning. There are many people we would like to thank, Mrs Peterson and the BOT for their work in the establishment of these classes, Ms Sands for the creation of the sign that was unveiled, the representatives of the Ministry of Education present, the Waikowhai Community for joining us to celebrate and finally the children of Waikowhai, there was great enthusiasm during the walk through and has been awesome energy in the building since.

Our cybersmart facilitator James collated this awesome video of the opening.



We would also like to thank one of our talented parents Mala for the amazing photos below.


We have had a successful first week and a bit of learning together and learning about ourselves.  As part of this we have used De Bono's thinking hats to reflect on our first three days.  Please read our individual blogs to find out more about what we are thinking about our new environment so far.

Week 2 - Creative Character Writing

Hi fellow bloggers,

Last week Room 8 were working on character descriptions.  On Monday we went to the site build your wild self and we got to create a character that was half human, half animal (or whatever we chose).  Then we created a y-chart each, that had our character and the main features of their looks, actions and personalities.  I have included this below for you to have a look at.  This is the creature that we created with Mr Riceman our teacher.  If you would like to find out about more of our characters please check out our individual blogs on the side of the page.

Here is the character description I created from this...

Mix-up (Room 8's shared writing)

Mix up has two green arms that stick out from the top of his body.  The four sucker fingers pads are extremely useful for him. Unusually, he has brown hair that is similar to a normal human.  Eight legs cover the bottom half of his body.  They are purple tentacles perfect for slithering up trees.  His buffalo snout is grey and brown, covered in coarse hair that helps him sniff his prey.  All in all, he is a very weird looking character!

The sticky finger pads help him with his favourite pass-time, climbing up walls and washing windows for a living.  The eight tentacles means he can manages 4 buckets and 4 brushes at the same time, while holding onto any smooth surface.  Once it hits 10:30, his snout twitches in search of the nearest long black coffee, he must get his fix!

Mix up is generous, he often donates his time to wash the windows of his local school, free of charge. There is a cheeky side to him.  Amongst his friends, he loves a practical joke and often plays tricks.  His friends also describe him as bookish, when not learning or causing trouble, his nose is buried firmly in the latest and most interesting work of Non fiction freshwater reading!

Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu introductions

Kia Ora,

This term we are looking more at blogging and we plan to share lots of learning as we get our individual blogs up and running.  We are part of the Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu blogging group where we will be working closely with three other classes around New Zealand to share and comment on the interesting learning that is happening.  As a start we have shared some google drawings of ourselves, some share what we like, others are developing skills so just show our names.

If you would like to find out more about us please check out our individual blogs on the side of the page.