Market Day Evaluation

Last week was Panmure Bridge's market day, every class made 1 or more products that they'd sell on the day. LS2 melted old crayons together to make rainbow crayons, LS1 made photo frames and the junior classes made things like pet rocks and Christmas cards. Before the market day, students had the chance to purchase "tokens" they'd use real money to buy them, but they wouldn't be using real money on the day. Every product was $1, although some stalls offered 2-3 items to make it a better deal. LS2's total profit was $88, because although we'd made $96, we had $8 worth of expenses.

Romeo And Juliet Animation

This week for inquiry Julian, Nevaeh and I needed to translate lines from the English that we use today, to the English that people of the Shakespearean age used. After we'd finished that, we then needed to read out what we'd written to the rest of the class. Our next task was to create an animation on a scene of our choice from Romeo and Juliet, because we ran out of time we needed to cut it short.

Teaching Younger Students About Firework Safety

Today Learning Space 2 got into groups and each created a presentation that gave 5 rules about safety when it came to fireworks as it is Guy Fawkes day (or fireworks night). To do this Jack, Aung Naing and I needed to make the 5 safety rules short but entertaining. When we'd finished, we presented our slideshow to Room 1. I liked doing this because we were able to create pictures.

Early Maori Enterprise

This week for inquiry my group and I needed to write down some notes on early Maori enterprise, after doing so we then summarised those into 5 sentences with 10 syllables per sentence. The last thing we did was stand up in front of the class and read out the sentences syllable by syllable.

This is our summary:
Maori enterprise started with trading. They traded items like food and clothing. Soon British travellers came wanting food. The British also wanted to buy land. Then Maori sold too much, they lost their land.

Water Filters

 

This week and last week for inquiry LS2 was learning about water filters and how to make them, we needed to find out what water filters need to work and how we could put the filters together.  All of the groups used plastic bottles, sand, rocks and charcoal to try and dilute dirty water. Although none of the groups completely filtered the water, some of them managed to get lighter coloured water.

STEAM Catapult Challenge

Last week for STEAM our task as a group was to create a catapult out of paper, tape and blu-tack. My group: Aung Naing, Sela, Karlos, Matthew and myself worked together to create a trebuchet. After rolling around 15 pieces of paper tightly, we taped them together to build the body. We also used a small plastic container to hold the object we were firing. Once our catapult was finished my group tested it out on a target.

Space Activity: Earth And Beyond

This week was the first week of our second rotation for Inquiry, LS1 and LS2 are joining together to learn more about space. We needed to use our prior knowledge about space to help us with our first activity which was a bus stop task that I worked together with Ong and Oscar to complete. After that we watched a video on space and the planets in our solar system, we learnt things like Neptune rains diamonds and Venus is the hottest planet.

Inquiry: Science Session

Today Mrs Wells came in again to help us with our science project, the fertiliser that I'm using changed from baked beans to peanut butter because there were no baked beans. In order to do this right we needed to follow a method; Put gloves on, get an ice cream container, get a scale, put an empty container on top, 0 the scale (Reset the counter so the container's weight doesn't add on), retrieve soil from junior garden, measure 40g of Peanut Butter into the ice cream container, measure 400ml of soil into the ice cream container using a beaker, label container with name and ingredient, use hands to stir and mix for one minute, measure 200 ml into one pot and the other 200ml in the other pot, mark 3 cm from tip of finger, push finger into middle of soil, drop in 1 bean seed (Phaseolus Vulgaris), cover seed with soil, water plant with 20 ml every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for two weeks. Thank you to Mrs Wells for coming in again to help us out.

Stardome Trip

On Thursday night most of LS2 went to the Stardome to learn about the stars. A man named Tobias told us about the different constellations and planets, we learnt that there are 88 official constellations like Sagitarius and Scorpius. We also learnt that Saturn's rings are made out of ice and dust particles, Jupiter has 67 moons and Saturn's rings can appear to disappear every 14 years. After that we were allowed to have look around the building, there were Lego models of space ships and rocket related activities.

Mrs Wells Inquiry Session

Today a woman named Mrs Wells came over from Tamaki College and taught Nyjah, Fui, Victoria, Mele, Julian, Giovanni, Jack and I about independent, dependent variables and different other terms. Over the next few sessions with her we'll be planting beans and fertilising them with an item of our choice; Nyjah chose tea leaves, jack chose soap, Giovanni picked crushed lollipops, Victoria chose salt, Julian's using potatoes, Mele's doing pear skin, Fui chose pencil shavings and I picked baked beans. Our task is to see how much the beans can grow by using our chosen fertiliser.

DARE Impact Message

This term, our focus for inquiry is DARE. It is a program that allows children to learn the dangers, and consequences of drug and alcohol use. Yesterday, Constable Cyrus came into our class to give us extra information about the use of them. We want to give a big thanks to Constable Cyrus for going out of his way to help us. This week, our challenge to alert others about these dangers was to create a DLO that showed what could potentially happen as a result of using drugs or alcohol. For this task, I worked with Jack and Julian, and we created a poster warning people about the dangers of drunk driving. On our DLO's we needed a strong message that would persuade people to think twice about driving drunk or using drugs. Our message was "Don't be like this guy, make a choice... Make the right choice..." We thought this was a strong message, and would work well.

Who Am I? Challenge

For the past previous week LS2 have been working on a challenge called Who Am I? This challenge is like Where Am I from but instead it is based on famous people around the world such as Tenzing Norgay, Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana etc. There were 10 people and for the task given we were to write down who they are, where there from, why are they famous, quote (if they have one), 5 facts about them, their country on google maps, their flag, and a picture of them. This was a lot of work which is why I was working with Miki and Ofa. 

New Zealand Shakeout Day

Today at around 9:30, an alarm went off. The reason it went off is because today is New Zealand
Shakeout day. A Shakeout day happens once every year, this year it was on the 18th of
November at 9:30. This event is a reminder for people who forgot or don’t know what to do
during an earthquake. What we learnt from this is, during an earthquake we have to drop,
cover, and hold. Which means, drop down, crawl under something that will protect you
(Eg: A table), and hold on to it. After the drill finished, we were asked to created a DLO
(Digital Learning Object) about what you’re supposed to do during an earthquake. If you'd
like to learn more about earthquake drills go to this site.

Bridge Building

For the past two weeks Ms Kirkpatrick's inquiry groups have been building bridges out of spaghetti, it sounds simple but it really wasn't because we needed to: Draw up a plan, tie spaghetti together with rubber bands, add tape to everything and also tie everything together with string. Other problems didn't help the production much either, like the sudden shortage of rubber bands and spaghetti. My group had four people in it, Fraidoon, Carl, Joseph and myself. Near the end of the week my group only had three walls so instead of having a rectangle we just connected two to make the sides, so we then had a triangle which is a stronger shape. When it was weighing time the block that could distribute the weight of the bricks wouldn't fit so instead we needed to use the hook, which wouldn't distribute the weight at all, therefore one piece of the bridge would be under lots of strain and the pieces next to it wouldn't be able to help much. After six around about one kg bricks our bridge broke. I had lots of fun whilst building my bridge because since I'd kept some rubber bands from the first day, whenever we were low on spaghetti we could just go and trade for more.

Virtual Reality Learning

Last week a group of researchers from the Augmented Human Lab in the University of Auckland came to use LS2 for their research with VR (Virtual Reality). The first test that we needed to do was read some small letters on one of the boards, the next test was for balance, we needed to walk in a straight line as fast as we could. After that another test was for eyesight, for it we needed to wear some special glasses and then look at a special book, if you didn't have the glasses on then you wouldn't see anything, but if you did, rough shape outlines showed up. The examiner would then point to a spot on the book and we would be told to say what we saw. Another part of the research was when they showed us a video and we then needed to answer a sheet related to it. They showed us two videos, on of them showed the very first Panmure bridge's construction and the other showed the way of transportation before the bridge. After that our task was to then re-do the sheet to see if we did any better.

Bridge Comparison

For Inquiry this term our topic is structures. Today we were looking at bridges. In pairs we were to create a Venn Diagram comparing the Auckland Viaduct Harbour Bridge with the Golden Gate Bridge. My partner was Alex. I learnt that 11 people past away during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. Did you know that cars can't cross the Auckland Viaduct Bridge.

Tunnel Purposes

For inquiry Ms Kirkpatrick's group needed to first get into our pairs, after that we then needed to either research different tunnel materials used for construction or the different tunnel purposes. I worked with Fraidoon, and together we found a few types of tunnels that everyday people use. Researching the different types was pretty hard because we didn't know many tunnels.

Cook Island Language Week

                    
This week is Cook Island language week and for it LS2 needed to get into our groups, in our groups we then needed to write down facts about the Cook Islands, its traditional foods, phrases and its flag. I worked with Ofa, Carl, Avalon and Joshua W. Carl and I also added in audio for the phrases (We tried our best to make it sound right).

Body Systems

This week for inquiry the task was to first read about body systems and the skeletal system before playing a game, for the game you needed to place all of the bones of the skeleton in the right place. In the human body there are 11 systems, they are the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, excretory, nervous, endocrine, immune, integumentary, skeletal (which was what the game was about), muscle and reproductive system. There are also around 200-300 bones in your body, some fuse together when you go through puberty or just get older.

M.R.S G.R.E.N

This week for inquiry the other task was to create a DLO on the 7 things that you can use to figure out if something is alive, we can remember the things by remembering a name, M.R.S G.R.E.N. The M is for movement, the R is for respiration, the S is for senses, G is for grow, R is for reproduction, E is for excretion and N is for nutrition.