Sandra Morris

Our second visitor for Book Week was Sandra Morris who is a New Zealand author and illustrator. We were very excited to listen to her because all our classes have looked at her nature journal book as part of our CIB. She talked to us about all the things we could find to look at, and especially about birds. At the end of the talk she drew a pukeko and showed us some ways to make drawing animals easier.

Room 30 - SPCA Day.

Room 30 pulled out all the stops for their SPCA day today. We had a range of activities ranging from a movie room, obstacle course, face painting, disco, and Dominate hair product for sale.

All students did an amazing job and ran their activities with such a high level of organisation and maturity we could have easily forgotten that they were Year 4!!

We raised a total of $473.10 for the SPCA. What a great effort!

Room 17's Native Bird Market.

A big thank you for all the delicious goodies you sent in. The children's bird market was a great success. At the beginning of the CIB the children did a survey of the animals we could find around school and we realized that there weren't many different types of birds in our school grounds.

The children wanted to try and solve this problem. We have learnt a lot about what a native bird is. What native birds like to eat and where they like to live.
We found out that the best way to get more native birds was to plant  native trees that they like to eat.

The children have been very excited about raising money to buy the native trees and we had a fantastic bird market today!

We have sold lots of bird feeders too, so hopefully the birds will be getting an extra snack to help them through the winter.

Christine Tintinger Visits Whetu

This morning, as part of Book Week Part 1, Christine Tintinger, the senior primate keeper at Auckland Zoo came to speak to Whetu. She told us all sorts of interesting information, including how the zoo has changed in the thirty years she has been there. She also talked about how she looks after the primates, and the things we can do to help protect the environments of the animals that live in the wild. She answered lots of our questions, and gave us lots of things to think about.

Christine Tintinger

Zoo Keeper Christine Tintinger came to talk to us about her job as a zoo keeper at Auckland Zoo. She has been at the zoo for 34 years, so she has seen lots of changes for the better. Now the animals are given much richer environments to live in, that stimulate their brains and keep them happy. She called it behavioural enrichment.

What are we saying?

As a part of our Explorer Time we have been learning about different types of communication other than speaking. Today we looked into ways of communicating a message or sentence with only our gesture and facial expression. Can you tell what we are saying?

Explorer Time with no rain!

We've had a few weeks now where rain has interrupted our Explorer Time. We still explore, but it is just a bit trickier! Today though, the sun shone, the wind dropped and we were back to our curious selves. Lots was happening, including the gardens being weeded ready for us to plant our new vegetable seedlings. These photos show three particular activities: carpentry, rock painting and making nature sculptures with the hot glue guns. The Balmoral habit we were focusing on today was 'managing self'.

The carpentry table was a very busy place.

Lots of problem solving had to happen to get pieces of wood to stay joined together.

Interesting structures were made.

The hot glue gunning was fun.

Lots of beautiful creations were made.

There was interesting paper to use as a base for the work.

Lots of intricate designs were thought of.

Here are some of the beautiful creations were made.

Room 29's Kakapo Market

The children voted to adopt a kakapo as there are only 123 left in the entire world and they are technically extinct, as they don't breed in the wild. To raise money, they had a market and raised enough to adopt two kakapos! They had to learn a lot about the kakapo, so that they could educate others at the market. The education tent was very popular and contained Ipads and headphones to listen to the special sound that the male kakpo makes to attract a female. The booming sound can be heard 5 kms away. The children also made a kakpo weighing 2kgs so that people could experience the heaviest, flightess parrot in the world.

Room 16 explores multiplication

Today we worked in groups and explored ways to work out multiplication problems.  Have a look at these photos to see us at work.

Art Inspired by Flox

Room 19 looked at the art of Auckland artist Flox. We then created our multi layered paintings of native birds and flowers (with the odd hibiscus here and there). It was great fun, and we are really delighted with how the paintings look up on our walls. You can find more information about Flox here: http://flox.co.nz/