Mantle of the Expert: NZ Documentary Designs: Day Four

Check out the latest post on the Mantle of the Expect Blog. Rose, Kieran and Rupert sound like they are having a fantastic time with Mrs Gain every Wednesday. Well done!

Mantle of the Expert: NZ Documentary Designs: Day Four: "This morning we received a letter from Margaret Ellis, Cyril’s younger sister. A Letter from Margaret Ellis She agreed to come in and be ..."

Disaster Experts

Over the past couple of weeks Room 15 have become experts at various types of natural disasters. We have decided to share our information by creating animated movies using xtranormal

Check out these fantastic interviews... there's more come too!

By Matthew



By Celine & Freijah



By Gareth & Ryan



By Xanthe & Maddy



By Freijah

Playing with Xtranormal

Over the next couple of weeks we will be experimenting with a cool web tool called Xtranormal to share our knowledge on natural disasters. This is a fantastic tool that allows you to create animated movies.
Yesterday we had a play with writing a basic script. Well done to the 'mystery' Room 15 student who had a play at home and made this great little clip.

Check it out!

What's the Plan Stan?

Our inquiry focus for this term Natural Disasters and how to prepare for them.



For our first week we brainstormed our existing knowledge on disasters with each other. We categorised this information into three groups:

How they occur?
Information on historic disaster
How to keep safe when they occur?

Fabric Art

Room 15 had a fantastic last week of Term 3 - we spent the majority of the time doing ART! For this actvity we focused on stenciling on fabric. We started by dying our fabric then we made stencils from paper. VERY CAREFULLY, we stenciled our designs onto our fabric using paint. To finish it off we CAREFULLY hand-sewed around our edges.

Photos from The Life of RIley

 

New Eastbourne Developments... Tell us what you think?

We have been working incredibly hard over the past 3 weeks preparing our proposals for a new community facility in Eastbourne. We finally finished this week and presented our proposals to the class using Keynote. Before we presented, we brainstormed and constructed a set of criteria to judge what would make a quality presentation. Here's what we came up with:



Click on the videos to view our presentations. We would really appreciate your feedback on if you think our proposals are a viable option for Eastbourne.

Beach clean up

On an usually sunny Wednesday afternoon we took our Room 3 buddies down to the beach to search for rubbish! At the same time we made a tally of the rubbish we collected to assist us with our statistics unit. We collected a total of 515 pieces of rubbish!!

We plan to collate the data and present it in a graph. (watch this space)

Thanks Room 3 for your fantastic help!

The Royal New Zealand Ballet

The Royal New Zealand Ballet visited Muritai School today. They showed us some of what they do in the training classes and they also showed us some dance. They were quite amazing and very talented dancers!

The results are in!

Thank you to everyone who completed our community survey (over 170 of you!). We are currently in the process of analysing the results and creating our proposals for a new community facility.

Here are some results from our survey.

Eastbourne Survey - We need you help!

As part of our social inquiry this term the students in Room 15 have produced a survey they would like you to complete on Eastbourne. IT IS VERY SHORT and only takes a couple of minutes to complete. To make the data accurate we really need as many responses as possible so every person in the house can complete it. It would also be great if you could forward this on to friends and family in the community.

Click on the link below or visit the class blog.

Eastbourne Survey

Thanks a lot

Stu Devenport and the students of Room 15

Production Preparation

This week we started to make our props for the production. Our theme for the show is 'Travel'.

Learning from Others

This week the Year 5 and 6 Team have had a couple of visitors to talk to us to assist us with our social inquiry process.

On Wednesday Nancy Barclay presented to us how she was involved in the process on widening the footpath between Windy Point and Days Bay. We learned that there was a lot of consultation needed with many different groups within the community.


On Thursday we had Derek and Ian visit us from the Eastbourne Community Board. They shared with us their plans to upgrade the village in Eastbourne.


We discovered that all these plans take a lot of time and cost a lot of money before they become reality.

Miss Coton

Over the past few weeks Room15 has been enjoying the company from our new student teacher Miss Coton. Miss Coton will be teaching us on her own for 3 weeks, till a week from the end of term three. So far she has been with us for 2 weeks and has 5 more weeks left with us. Everyone in room15 has enjoyed Miss Coton being with us and helping us with our work!!!
AND SHE IS REALLY FUNNY AS YOU CAN SEE By Lucy and Kieran

The way we were...

Over the past couple of weeks Room 15 has been investigating how Eastbourne looked in the past. We have used Google Maps to share our mini reports on community facilities from the past.

Click on the images of the past to find out more.


View Eastbourne History by Room 15 in a larger map

Images from the past

Big Questions:

1. What did it used to be like?
2. What is it like now?
3. Why has it changed?

Literacy Log updated

Our Literacy Log has been updated with short recounts from our recent holiday. Jump over to have a read!

Siapo Patterns

Room 15 have been looking at the art of siapo from Samoa. We noticed how the designs have lines of symmetry and points of rotations.

WALT: to create a design that has at least 4 lines of symmetry and a point of rotation.

Historic Walk

For our social inquiry this term we are looking at how Eastbourne has changed over the past 100 years. In particular, we are looking at how community resources have changed over the years.

Today we took a little (wet) walk around our immediate community. Right next door to school we found a sign for Ballinger Gardens and learned that this used to be a croquet club.

We then visited Rona Bay Wharf and discovered how this busy it really used to be! It regularly was used for ferries to arrive and depart from, along with fishing boats. As the roads to Eastbourne improved there was less demand to use the ferry service.

What a Character!

This term for writing we are focusing on writing quality character descriptions. We have been discussing what makes a great characterisation. We started by looking at examples from the book we are reading together - Bootleg by Alex Shearer. We used the description of the scary Chocolate Inspector to develop a criteria.

This is what we have come up with so far (click on the image it bigger):

Symmetrical Designs

This week we have been investigating symmetry during maths. We created these designed that used two lines of symmetry. We selected images from the web then used the alpha tool on Keynote to edit out the background. We then used the metric tool to rotate and reflect our images.

In Stitches for TGiF

Check out these fantastic bags a small group of children had the opportunity make for our latest cycle of TGiF. Click on the videos made by Rupert and Celine to see how they were made.

A massive thanks to Rach Evans who came in to help us make these groovy bags.

Speech Finals

Well, our annual speech competition is over for another year. The standard of speeches this year were excellent with a wide variety of topics chosen by our 6 finalists.

A special well done to Billy who won the Year 5 final. Also to Olly who not only who the Year 6 finals but was our overall winner.

Check out the slideshow above to view the videos of each presentation. (double click on an image to take you to the video)

An awesome effort everyone!!

How does hydro generate electricity?

Hydro solar geothermal wind these are all examples of renewable energy sources.Renewable energy is created by natural resources and can be changed into electricity.

Hydro is just another word for water.A hydro power plant is usally placed in the middle of a river hence the water can't come through.As a result fo this a lake is usally formed behind.

A Hydro dam uses water to generate electricity.First the water goes through the fish gate this helps stop fish from coming through.Then the water travels through the penstock which is a small tube just over 2 centimeters wide.Next the water flows through the turbines which are the main electronic part in making electricity.The turbines are a round hole at the back of the buildingInside these round opening are four big blades the water runs through the turbines as the blades are sping and the electricity made gose up to the generator.After that the electricity made goes through the powder lines then speard around a town or city for electricity.

Hydro power is a great way of generating electricity because the world has so much water and it doesn't harm the invironment.

By Hannah Joy Godard

How do how hydro dams generate electricity?

Speech update

Well done to everyone involved in the Speech Semi-Finals last Friday. A total of 13 speeches were delivered and all were of a very high standard. It was an extremely tough decision for our judges but 3 finalists from each year group were selected.

Year 5:

Matthew
Harry
Billy

Year 6:

Olly
Louis
Carlotta

These six will participate in the Speech Finals this Thursday afternoon judged by Mr. Bird and Mr. Skilton.

Best of luck to everyone!!

Literacy Log updated

Check out the latest post on our Literacy Log from Celine. A great example of explanation writing. Well done Celine!

First round of speeches done!

The end of week 8 has also seen the end of the first round of speeches. Wow! What a fantastic effort made by everyone. The standard of the speeches this year was exceptional with a wide variety of topics chosen. Mrs Hooke and Mr Devenport had the very tough job of deciding who delivered the top 3 speeches to go through to Round 2: The Year 6 Finals. After much deliberation Carlotta, Olly and Matthew were selected to represent Room 15 this Friday. They will take on 2 Year 6's from Room 14 and 3 from Room 12. Best of luck guys!

Well done to everyone on a top job!

Independent Inquiry

This week we started our independent inquiry on renewable energy. Our task is to make an informed opinion on the big idea above. To do this we need to investigate the pros and cons of several forms of renewable energy, including solar. This is a big task and will involve a lot of concentration. It will also require us to use many skills including skimming and scanning, note taking and summarising (to name just a few!)

So far we have brainstormed our existing knowledge and thought carefully about some questions we would like to investigate. On Wednesday we used the www to start gathering information to assist us answering our questions.

Below is link to a wiki that has a wide variety of websites on different types of renewable energy. We used this as our starting point for research.

Schoolgen Solar Patrolers

For the last couple of days we have been forming the Solar Patrolers, a group representing schoolgen at work in our school. We will be presenting how well our solar panels are doing every assembly. We will also tell you a fun fact and ask a solar question. If you get it correct, there are housepoints up for grabs! If you have any questions ask Matty, James or Mr Devenport.

Stan pays us a visit.

Today Room 15 was visited by Stan Swan, our local solar scientist. He shared with us the benefits of solar energy plus explained why we have seasons. We then got to making! We were each given an average solar garden lamp to dismantle so we could create a new use for it. We all had a heap of fun. Thanks Stan!

Pencil Sketches

Check out our completed pencil sketches! We have spend a long time on these pieces trying to perfect our tones and shades. We needed to remember to draw what we saw not what we think we saw.

What do you think?

Explanations from Inquiry

Today we used the Voicethread to record our explanations we have written over the past couple of weeks. We have broken our explanations into paragraphs so you will hear the 'What' before the 'How or Why'.

Conductors & Insulators

Today we investigated the difference between a conductor and an insulator. Through our discussion we came to the conclusion that conductors let electrons travel through it. Insulators stop electrons from traveling through it.

We spent the afternoon testing different material to confirm if they were conductors or insulators.


 
 
 
 

The Sun

Check out this fantastic music video about The Sun. Thanks for sharing it with us Mrs R!

Completing the circuit

Today we explored how to make a complete electrical circuit to make a bulb glow. Later in the week we will explore how to represent an circuit on paper.

This website is a great site to practice drawing a circuit! Check it out.

Following the Shadows

Today we investigated the path of the sun across our sky. We were also exploring the relationship between the placement of the sun and the length of our shadows.

We discovered the lower the sun is in sky the longer our shadow will be. The higher the sun is in the sky and shorter our shadow will be.

At midday the sun is at its higher point and is at its most powerful. This position is called Meridian.

Earth's movement.

World of Maths

The year 5 and 6 syndicate had a visit from the World of Maths road show today.
There were so many 'hands on' problems to solve - some of them quite challenging, some of them not as challenging.
It was a lot of fun, check out the slide show to see some of the problems we had to solve.