Screen Clean Instructions

With winter chills and colds about the place I think we need to be extra careful in keeping our computer keyboards and screens nice and clean. Click on the graphic for instructions on how to do it.

Our High, High Hopes

Mr Crosby's class from Sparks, Nevada, USA took our High Hopes high, high, high up beyond earth last week.
Last week Mr Crosby asked us to record our 'High Hopes' for the future so we added them as comments to his class blog. Our comments were then added to a balloon payload as it left the earth's atmosphere.

The balloon, filled with gas rose to 32,857 metres and lasted about 90 minutes before the balloon could not expand anymore and fell to the ground. As well as our high hopes it carried a camera that took photos every 30 seconds or so. They got some stunning photos of the earth far below.

You can see more of the photos of the flight on their Flickr photo site.

Thank you for a great opportunity.

Zoe at Stonehurst

In the holidays Grace, Summer and I went to Stonehurst Adopt-a-pony day. My pony reared up because the little black pony bit his bum and my pony kicked her.THIS IS ALL OF US.

Sent in by Zoe G through her Google Docs. Clever girl.

53,000 Views Party

Today we had our big class party at lunch time. It was also part of our homework for the week. We had to make a healthy lunch to share. All the food was yum, yum, yummy.

Here is all the food we had for our party lunch.

What a great achievement it is to have a blog that has had well over 50,000 views. We started off very small on November 12th, 2005 with a photo and a couple of lines of text. This blog is now the hub of our digital e-learning and it continues to grow as we learn more and collaborate more.

Thank you so much to all our lurkers, contributors, children, teachers and all the people who leave us comments. You rock! 

Discovery Time #5

Discovery Time continues to be a class favourite. I bought along my vice to help hold the wood still. Children are very careful not to saw or cut through the seats.
We have been able to use the Kin-x all week while the seniors are away.
Computing is a good job for Shona whose shoulder bone really is fractured.
Sharon painted a lovely still life bunch of flowers. Conor was pretty proud of his alien as well.
Tarn painted his salt dough 3D sculpture from last week.
Santana made snails from the play dough.
Some people had their guitar lessons with Antoni.
A different team worked on the robotics kit. It is starting to take life.

Blogmeister

We are going to have our 53,000 blog view party at lunch time today. As a way of celebrating and while the senior classes are away I have borrowed their laptops so we can have a laptop morning for blogging.
With blogmeister blog every child can have their own text blog. Keep your fingers crossed at that it all goes well.

Practice Quiz

Practice on PhotoPeach

Discovery Time #4

We had our fourth Discovery Day on Wednesday because it ties in nicely with children going in and out to guitar practice and band.

Tommy and Sam worked very well together to create this with Linda's construction kit.
Zoe made a wooden title for her bedroom. I am not sure what Hunter will think of that!
Drilling holes is great fun too- Harriet might end up making holes in the table. Everyone is very careful though.

My Greatest Feet

We got our pedometers today. We are measuring our steps to walk around South Africa to support the All Whites as they gear up to play in the FIFA World Cup.

We Have A WINNER!

Richard at the aquarium today announced the winner of the chocolate fish jigsaw competition from Monday. And the winners are......

Elise from St Claire School in Dunedin for her answer 'I think it is a sea sponge and is formed by larvae and the babies are called sissiles'.

And Barb from Hamilton with her answer 'I think it's a shell or rock covered in feeding tubes left by tube worms'.

Could Mrs B let Allanah know where to send Elise her chocolate fish.

Here is the put together jigsaw.

The Whale

Yesterday Tarn, Tarn's Mum, Tarn's little sister, Isaac, Raewyn, Mrs Pritchard and Allanah went on a big long walk down to the end of Rabbit Island- Moturoa to see if it was true- that there was a dead whale on the beach.

So you know where it is Allanah put this Google Earth Map on the blog so you know where to look. Here is what Tarn and Isaac had to say about the whale.
It took at least an hour to walk from the car park down to where the whale was. My Dad had told me about it from an item in the newspaper and my Mum said if I get all my homeowrk done I could chose a friend to come with us. My friend is Isaac.
It was awesome seeing such a big thing washed up on Rabbit Island. It is not something you see every day.
I wasn't enjoying the smell of the dead whale. It smelt like tons of rotten fish. We could only just stand the smell.
Isaac is standing in front of the whales head. It is pretty impressive. We could see the whale's blow hole.
Ilza threw up twice with the smell of the dead whale.
On the way home we saw Allanah, Mrs Pritchard and Raewyn coming down to look at the whale as well.

Keegan went down to Rabbit Island this morning just as the DOC workers were about to bulldoze a hole to bury the whale.

Spelling Rules for words ending in 'y'

Today we looked in more depth at the spelling rule for making plurals out of words ending in 'y'. This game will help practice the skill.

Adding To a Tidy Number

Some of us are having a bit of trouble with adding to a tidy number so here is a little game to practice the skill. Click on the graphic to go to the web site.

Interface Magazine

Interface magazine is a monthly hardcopy magazine and website for teachers to share their learning and news about using computers for e-learning. It gets sent out to every school in New Zealand and lots of teachers get their own individual copy to keep. I noticed today that they are featuring our blog. That's nice isn't it.

Google Docs

I am really pleased with the way that children are learning using their Google Docs. We had our very first log in in the last week of last term and now look how far we have come. Last night Marshall showed us how to make a presentation in his Google Doc. I never taught him that. He worked it out for himself and shared it with me before school had even started. With a little clever internet wizardry we are able to share his presentation on our blog.

Santana worked really hard with her report on Whales in writing time also.

They swim in the sea and come up to the surface. They are the size of ten elephants in a row. Their habitat is big rocks they sleep amongst a lot of big rocks. There are a lot of kinds of whales. There is killer whales humpback sperm wale and baby whales. They live in the deep dark ocean. Whales eat plankton and a lot of other sea food. They swim in the sea looking for their baby whale.


Clever Santana wrote this story on the Alpha-Smart word processor and then uploaded it to her Google Doc and proof read it. She added a rather cool drawing in to her Google Doc as well.

Rocky Shore!

On Monday we went to the Rocky Shore in Mapua and Ruby Bay. We went for a walk to Grossi Point and Allanah asked us some questions about the rocky shore and we had a good look around.
Then we had morning tea on the wharf. Nobody was allowed five planks away from the edge because Allanah was scared that we were going to fall in.
After we had walked along Grossi Point we went to the aquarium to look at the sea animals and learn about the sea and other stuff.
We loved looking at the stingray coming up.
The tide was a long way out when we got to the Rocky Shore.
The first thing that we did when we got to the rocky shore was have our lunch.
Can you see what Tarn has got in his viewer?
It really was a stunning day.
We found lots of interesting creatures living between the tides.

We all worked together to carefully lift rocks so we didn't disturb the creatures too much.
We did population counts of the creatures we found at low tide, mid tide and high tide. When we got back to school we made a spreadsheet of our results in Google Docs. We could all edit it at the same time. WOW!

Richard told us an interesting story of what the Maori used this creature for.
Richard tells the story in this video.

Then we played Survivors of the Rocky Shore. That is an excellent resource that Richard had made himself. We will be able to play it back at school.

Thanks everybody for a great day out.

Rocky Shore Jigsaw

This is a jig-saw I made from a photo we took at the rocky shore yesterday.To do the jig-saw click on the graphic. Do the jig saw. Now here is the fun part.

Leave a comment in the comments box below saying what you think it is and how you think it is made.

I will not publish the comments until Monday when I will have our local marine educator, Richard, judge which answers are the best or closest to being correct. The winners will receive a CHOCOLATE FISH!

Individual entries only though because I can't afford whole bags of chocolate fish.

Entries are welcome also from our rocky shore wiki buddies and other children at Appleby School.