Merry Christmas from room 5 & George

We have had lots of fun this week to finish off a brilliant year. We went to Riverside Pool with Room 6 for a swim, we had Secret Santas, we had a Bubble Party with our buddies and we packed up our room for the long holidays.
We have all had fun with our class blog and posting on our own blogs too. The Year 4's will try to set up new blogs in their new classes and the Year 3's might try to link theirs to the new Room 5 blog.
George is going to Evie's house for the long holidays. We wonder if he will enjoy having a big bath before he comes back to school.
Viv is having a term off and Sarah is teaching Room 5 for the first term.
This is our last blog for the year so Merry Christmas and look out for our new blog by our new class next year.

Our Chinese Dragon Dance

It's the end of the term and the end of our school year so we had a celebration of our own because we have been learning all about celebrations. We had a celebration like the Chinese New Year parades. We had started with a shared tea and all of the families brought lovely food for us. Next we had the lion Dance and the Dragon parade. Room 6 led the parade because they were the lions. Room 13 were next with a white dragon, Then came Room 3 with a red dragon and we were at the back of the parade.We went right around the front field. Fenn's dad, Peter made a fireworks display for us. There were happy bangers and a confetti cannon that spurted out a fountain of confetti strips.

"The fireworks were loud and amazing," said Josh.

"Everybody brought a lot of food," said Ella.

"It was really, really fun," said Isi.

Singing with Suzanne Prentice

On Tuesday, the senior choir went out to the Hope Church to sing at the Suzanne Prentice concert. We went for a practice on Tuesday morning.
We sang "See You Later Alligator" and a big alligator came out. His tail accidentally hit Rohan and Joe then he gave the choir teacher Tanya a kiss. Hannah did a solo song.

"My favourite song was Banana Boat," said Joe P.
"I liked being in the front row where everybody could see me," said Rohan T.
"I liked when Suzanne put the microphone to my mouth. I forgot the words when she did that," said Joe R.
"It was funny when Snappy sat on a girl and made girls dance," said Josh.
"I thought it was funny when the alligator came out," said Isi.
"I liked doing the actions," said Evie.
"It was funny when Suzanne kept on waving goodbye when she was leaving," said Rohan.

It was a wonderful performance!

We're famous!

Last week we had a message from the people at Digitalnz because they had seen our Memory Maker movies. Fiona asked us if we could make a movie at school to tell them about what we had been doing and how we liked their Digitalnz site. We made the movie and they are so pleased with it that they are going to use it at their official opening launch tomorrow. You can see our movie on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cutQ8oU9scA

Leave us a comment to tell us what you think.

DigitalNZ

The National Library of New Zealand are collaborating with organisations throughout New Zealand including Te Papa and other museums to design easy ways of finding, sharing and using New Zealand's digital items. The place to explore this is Digital NZ.

On November 11 it was the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Armististice to end World War 1 so we made a movie in class using digital material on the Coming Home Memory Maker site. Later that week some room 5 people showed their families how to make a digital movie using this site.

Check out our movies.

• Lest We Forget by Room 5 Nelson Central School
• WWW11 by Tom
• War by Thomas
• the movie of joe by Joe R
• Peace at Last by Evie

Great News by Ella
Dig NZ by Hannah
Wartime by Josh

ICT Expo

We went for a bus trip to Victory School hall today because lots of schools were showing the work they have been doing this year with computers, cameras, voice recorders and other technology. We saw some of the movies that Room 5 made earlier this year.

" I liked the magnifying wand," said Hannah.

" I Liked how you could make realistic people on the Marvin programme," said Josh.

"I thought the photo booth was cool because it made you look funny"

"I thought the robotic toys were really cool. My favourite one was the bear that played a drum," said Rohan O.

" I liked the monkey playing the tambourine," said Thomas.

Suter Colours

Halloween

We are learning about the diverse ways that people celebrate their special occasions.
We interviewed Natayla's father Peter to learn how he celebrated Halloween when he was a child and to discover how Halloween celebrations have changed in USA and New Zealand.

Celebration hats

In room 5 we have been learning about celebrations so we made hats that would show us celebrating special events. Some people celebrated Matariki and Halloween and Anzac Day and other special events.
Room 13 showed us their hats that they had made and we showed them ours. When our buddies came to our class we showed them our hats as well.
"I made a hat that showed a Matariki celebration," said Josh.

"I made a hat that showed a Christmas celebration," said Isi.

"I made a hat that showed a Matariki celebration," said Evie

"I made a hat that showed a Halloween celebration," said Joe R.

"I made a hat that showed a New Year celebration," said Bella.

A Visit From a Famous New Zealand Author

It's the Nelson Arts Festival this week and some people from Room 5 have already performed with the choir at the Red Square in town. Lots of us watched the Mask Parade and Rohan went to see "In the Deep End"
Last week a new children's book called "Herbert the Brave Sea Dog" was launched. It's a true story about a dog that was washed overboard in the sea near French Pass. Room 5 were lucky to get a visit from Robyn, who wrote and illustrated the book.

"I think Robyn is very skilled at drawing," said Josh.
"I think Robyn has probably been practising nearly all her life, because she's so good," said Sam.
"I really enjoyed reading the book and looking at the illustrations," said Hannah.
"I liked the end papers because they show Herbert's journey," said Evie.
"I think Robyn takes a lot of care with her work," said Thomas.
"It was amazing how Robyn drew that picture of Herbert and the dolphin for us to keep, in three minutes," said Ella.

George's First Day at Nelson Central School

We are going to create a new blog so Room 5 in Nelson can leave postings about George's adventures. We will invite Room 5 in Cambodia to tell us what Wiki has been doing too.

Rooms 5 & 6 have been getting together this week to0 do team building activities so we are all ready to get along well together on camp. Yesterday we pretended that the adventure playground was full of flesh eating fish and we had to get our teams across from one side to the other using only two little mats. Today we worked with a partner on the blindfold walk.

You will see George, having fun in the photos. Later on we will research monkeys so we can learn more about George's family.

Viv's new Voki

Click here to comment on this Voki.
Get a Voki now!



I found this blingy thing for blogs in the holidays and I thought that this could be a fun thing to do on our blogs when we have finished making movies and camp shows. I tried to make her look and sound a bit like me. Hope you like her.

Wiki Playing with Room 5 Children

Holiday time

We looked at our new friends' blog today and we have put a link to it in our links section. We tried to leave some comments but there was a problem . Every time we pressed the publish button, our comments disappeared. We won't be able to comment now until after the holidays so good luck with your blogging Year 5. Tracey will be able to tell us more when we see her after the holidays because she is coming to visit you. We loved your soft toys so much we decided to send you a kiwi to add to your collection. We took some photos of Wiki Kiwi in the playground before we gave him to Tracey. We know he will enjoy staying with you at your school and that you will look after him.

Finishing off Term 3

We have done lots of exciting and interesting things in and around Room 5 over the last three weeks.
We have had tennis coaching. Thomas already has tennis lessons so he was our expert on the day. Some other people from our class play tennis and they are practising their skills using our padda-tennis bats at play time.
We went to Penguinos ice-cream shop to see how they make their ice-cream. We were so lucky because after we saw the ice-cream come out of the machine we were given our own Penguinos ice-cream and Philip, the owner, let us choose our favourite flavour. Did you know that there are more than 70 penguins, (pictures, borders, ornaments and stuffed toys) in that shop? They have won gold and silver medals for their ice-cream.
We are still learning new dances at Jump Jam. Viv's favourite dance is Crazy Frog. We go on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays.
The last thing we have done is our Trade Fair. We used all of the information we acquired in our research to write a speech. We pretended to be Exhibitors and we were marketing our ice-cream to the visitors. We pretended the visitors were Retailers. Some people said their speeches 50 times and everyone had orders written on their order forms. If only the ice-cream was real we could be very rich.

Our Ice-cream Trade Fair

Comments from Cambodia

We are so lucky that people from all over the world read our blog. Our buddy class teacher Tracey has some friends in Cambodia where she used to teach and they have been reading our blog. We have had some lovely comments from Ellie, Adi, Christina, Anouk, Jalesa, Maliya, Sangmin and Alex. They have started up a blog and we would like to look at it so we can get to know them better. You can read their comments on our posting "Working in our Inquiry Groups" just below. Viv tried to connect to the address they sent but she couldn't get the blog to come up. Perhaps Tracey might be able to help us when we see her at buddy time on Friday. It will be fun getting to know some new friends in Cambodia.

Working in our Inquiry Groups

In reading this week we have been researching more information about ice-cream so we can prepare for our speeches at our "Trade Fair." We have been reading an article in an Air New Zealand flight magazine about a company called "New Zealand Natural Ice Cream." We had one main reader and we each had our own work sheet to complete so we had to co-operate to make sure we all found out the information we needed. Some of the information was right there in the text but some was hidden. We had to really think hard about some questions because we had to work on things we already knew. We used all of our reading strategies and our co-operative working skills.
We found out that ice-cream companies love it when airline companies buy their ice-cream. It's good advertising. The passengers will buy the ice-cream when they get home. New Zealand Natural ice-cream has won gold medals. Sometimes the food technologists design a flavour that's good and sometimes it's not successful. Coconut flavour was not successful because it was too white.

Hearing From Eli

It was great to hear from Eli today when we went to the library for our eLearning time. Thanks for leaving a comment on Joe R's blog. We all read it and thought about you Eli. We are all wondering why you only have 20 minutes for lunch. When do you get to have a playing time with your friends? How is that little kiwi Rachel getting along? Have you taken her to your school yet?
We have lots of questions to ask you. Do you have a class blog? Do you have another personal blog? How long is morning tea time at your school?
You have probably read that we have just run our Cross Country Event. Joe R came sixth which was an improvement on last year. David Zohrab won and Thomas, his twin came second kin that age group. In your age group, Joe P came first and Sam came second.

ID Me

We went to the Suter Art Gallery again today. The exhibition was about how artists can show their identity in ways other than portraits. Kelly's sister had an art work in the exhibition. The art works were made by students from the local colleges as well as famous New Zealand artists. We talked about why artists used some images to show us about about themselves. We chose a picture of an animal and wrote ways that we were similar to it. After that we drew a contour of our animal on coloured paper. When we had cut them out, we arranged the animals like Richard Killeen does in his works. If you would like to see Richard Killeen's cut outs look on his website.
http://www.richardkilleen.com/paintings/1980/1980.html

Esther told us that when Richard Killeen sends his cut outs to a gallery, the people at the gallery can arrange the cut outs in the way they like best. We arranged our cut outs in different ways too.

I chose a giraffe because I am tall like one. Samantha

I chose the seal because I love to swim. Rohan O

I chose the elephant because I like to eat lots. Rohan T

I chose the deer because I am a fast runner. Bella

Our School Cross Country

We have been practising for our cross country event since the beginning of the term. It has been tricky because quite often the rain has stopped us from having a practice. We even thought that the rain might stop us from having our event. The Botanics, where we normally run is closed but that didn't stop us. Cheryl and Dave organised a course all around our school and luckily the weather on our big day was just wonderful. We had children from our Syndicate who ran first in their own age group event and later in the Open Race which was the one the Totara Syndicate had run. Everyone ran well and it was a great afternoon.

Kahikatea Olympics

We have all been following the Olympic Games in Beijing so we decided to celebrat our learnong with our own fun games. There were in five teams with children from each class in Kahikatea Syndicate in each team. Each team had their own big flag and the competitors had small Olympic flags. The events were fun. There was gumboot throwing, quoit throwing, gymnastics, bean bag throw into a target and "kayak" relays.

Arum

On Wednesday we went to the Suter Gallery to see an exhibition of lilies called Arum. The artist, Anne Rush, had the idea of making and displaying 500 lilies in an installation. She had changed the gallery so the room was round and it was all white. She had lilies on the walls and hanging on white bamboo poles. We thought the lilies looked as if they were swirling in the wind.

It was very peaceful in the exhibition and Esther talked to us about remembering times, pets and people who were gone from our lives but stayed memories in our minds.

After we had looked at the installation, we made our own flowers to hang on the wall of memories outside the gallery. You gan go and look at our art work any time and if you want to visit Anne Rush's work, it is free to go to the Suter on Saturdays.

Magical Stars Choir Concert

On Tuesday night there was a fantastic, phenomenal, fizzy choir concert. Children from our school have been learning their songs and practising for this concert. There was greatfood and drinks before it started. Parents, Grandparents and friends filled the audience. There were stars everywhere; sparkling in jars along the path to the hall, sparkling all over the hall walls and of course there were singing stars too.
It started off with the TePouahi children and that set the scene for a wonderful evening of song. We think that the choir has probably raised quite a bit of money from the ticket sales and they are going to use the money to pay to make a recording of their singing.
We are so lucky to have Tania, for our choir teacher. (You might have seen some of her coments on our blog.) We are lucky to have Sarah to play the piano for the choir too.
Well done everyone who was involved. The audience loved it!

Making Ice-cream - The second try

Yesterday we had another try at making ice-cream in class. We did it differently this time so we couldn't make it a fair test for science but we did get ice-cream in the end. We used plastic clip lock bags instead of glass jars. We used blue top milk insead of cream but everything else was the same.

This is how you make ice-cream :

• First put ice in a big plastic bag,
• Next measure the milk, vanilla essence and sugar into the small plastic bags,
• Mix 200g of salt with ice so that the ice goes slushy and helps the milk to freeze,
• After that put the small milk bag inside the ice bag,
• Then shake it all around for about 10 minutes and little by little your milk will turn into ice-cream,
• Finally serve your ice-cream into cups and eat it.

YUM!

Ice-cream - The First Try!

We tried to make ice-cream in class today. We used a recipe from a School Journal. It was cream, sugar and vanilla essence. We put the ingredients in a small jar then put the small jar with ice all around it, inside a large jar We rolled and rolled the jars for a long time. It wasn't very successful but even though it didn't freeze, it still tasted like melted vanilla ice-cream.

It was Rohan's birthday. Imagine being 8 on 8.8.08. If he was in China people would think he was very lucky. Rohan baked a cake in an eight shape for us to share so we ate that with out "ice-cream sauce." It was yummy.

Next time we are going to try a different way of making ice-cream with milk. Let's hope we can get that to freeze!

Peace Week

This week is Peace Week so we have been thinking about what that means to us. We read a story about Sadako and the thousand cranes. Sadako was a japanese girl who became ill with leukemia because of the atomic bombs which were dropped on Japan in 1945. Sadako made lots of paper cranes because she thought that if she could make 1000 of them she would get well again. Sadly she died before she could make that many. Even today Japanese children make paper cranes to decorate the statue of Sadako in the Peace Park.
We made some cranes too and thought about what PEACE means to us. You can see our cranes and those from other classes in a lovely display in the foyer at school. We hope it makes you think about peace when you see it.

Milk on the Move

We investigated what happens when you add detergent to milk.
What You Need:
Milk,
Food colouring,
Shallow dishes,
Detergent,
Eye droppers or straws
What You Do:
· Pour milk into a dish (about 1 cm in depth).
· Use an eye dropper or straw to add a few drops of food colouring to the milk in different places.
· Use a separate eye dropper and add 1 drop of detergent to the middle of the milk.
We tried using three different types of milk and we found that the food colouring swirled faster when there was more fat in the milk. Next we predicted what we thought would happen if we repeated the test with cream. Some people thought the colouring would move fast and others thought it would move slowly. They were both roght because it took a long time for the food colouring to move and but once it started it did swirl for a long time.
FRIDAY SCIENCE IS FUN!

Wednesday. Stormy night

We had a huge storm in Nelson yesterday so we wrote about it today. This is Rohan's report.

On Wednesday, 30th July there was a massive storm that destroyed Nelson. We were in our classroom when we head the whirling wind smashing and knocking off the huge branches. The basketball hoops fell down and the rubbish bin was blowing all over the front field.
When I was walking over to the bus on the front ield the wind was blowing me and the bus was wbbling. When I was walking up the hill to my house, the wind was blowing me backwards and it blew me onto the road. There was a powercut but luckily the lights turned back on at 7 o'clock. I reckon about one thousand trees fell over

Ice-cream

We had an exciting time at eLearning time today. We are learning about ice-cream because our rich task this term is to promote our own "ice-cream product" at a Trade Fair. We will need to learn lots of things before we can give a speech to promote ice-cream so we started answering some of our Inquiry questions today.

It was a bit different because we were doing "pair - share" where we work in pairs, not inquiry groups. Tomorrow we will discuss the information in our inquiry groups and that way we will all learn more about ice-cream.

We visited two fantastic websites which had wonderful pictures of enormous ice-creams as well as lots of information.

Click on Tip Top to go to the website.

Click on Much More Land to go to that website. We went to the consumer part because we love consuming (eating) icecream.

As usual everyone worked very,very hard!

Fabulous Fridays

We are going to have such fun times on Fridays this term that it will hardly seem as if we are working. After morning tea we are going to be doing science investigations. We did our first one today and it was all about milk. It was called "What Can We Find Out About Milk?" We had six different types of milk to test. There was Trim Milk, Organic Full Cream milk, Mega Vitamin Enriched Milk, Goats' Milk , Evaporated Milk and Condensed Milk. We recorded our answers to these questions. What colour is it? How Does it look? How does it pour? How does it taste? Some of the milks tasted lovely and some people thought some milk was disgusting. You might be able to tell that from the photographs.

Term 3 Our Trading Partners.

This term we are learning about how countries are connected to each other through Trade. Our topic for this term is called Trading Partners. We had a homework activity about it. It was a Scavenger Hunt to see how many products we could find at home that had been imported into New Zealand. After that we brainstormed in our Inquiry Groups for five minutes and we managed to think of 45 different products in 5 minutes. Some products were Cellotape, women’s cosmetics, Soft soap, board games, felt pens and balloons.

Cold Comfort

We are lucky to have the Suter Art Gallery so close to our school. This week we went to view an exhibition of 3 dimensional works that were made from thread of different types. There were floor rugs that looked like mountains and other interesting shapes. We had a chance to try weaving and rug hooking. We enjoyed it so much we didn't want to display our own work at school. We couldn't wait to take it home.

We had a cake stall today because we are raising money for our camp. We are not going to camp until Term 4 but we want to get started on our fund raising early as the other classes need to do fund raising too. Our camp is going to be at Teapot Valley. Our buddies, Riley and Sophie came to buy cakes and it was their very first cake stall. We raised $107. That's a great start!

Fun and Games

It was fantastic fun in Room 5 this morning, even before school started. Viv had given us the homework task of designing a game that we could play inside on a rainy day. We started playing our games as soon as we arrived. We were only allowed 2 sticks, 2 straws, a table tennis ball, as much string as we needed, and cellotape if we needed it. Viv had the equipment ready for us when we arrived.
Hamish made a hockey game to play on the carpet. There were heaps of games like table tennis, netball, soccer and lots of other games.
Everyone made up a game. They made it fun because it was creative.

Googling Nelson for Tourists

We had a wonderful session this week at elearning- (that's short for electronic learning.) We pretended we were tourists and we googled "Interactive Map of Nelson". We found a great website of a map of Nelson which had pictures of pins. If you click on the pins you can find accommodation, activities, restaurants and tourist shops. The address is;
www.harlequin.co.nz/MAPS/mapsfrontpage.htm
You should try it if you want to find out more about maps or the things we have in Nelson.