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.