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!