Onesie and Wacky hair day!

Last Friday was our onesie and wacky hair day. Room 3 looked amazing!
We had some very wacky hairdos and some very snuggly onesies.

We had this day to raise funds to give back to kidscan. Kidscan are an amazing charitable trust that supply us all here at school with some pretty awesome things, such as our awesome warriors jackets, all our amazing food, new shoes, and plasters and tissues. All of these things have been so helpful for us all.

Congratulations to Shayne, Violet and Lucas for being Room 3's wackiest and onesiest!

Our last week this week! Enjoy the week and have a safe and fun holiday!
Miss D'Ath

Making butter!

This term we have been investigating and seeing how egg beaters work.
Last Friday we wanted to test out our hand egg beaters, and race them against the electric egg beaters.
To do this we decided to make butter. Room 3 had to work out where butter comes from...... funny how it comes from a cow! But we decided it didn't come out of the cow as butter.
Our butter began as milk. This was then left to set so that the cream set on top. The cream was gathered and put into a bottle- which Miss D'Ath purchased from the shop.

We made sure we had 2 iPads at the ready so that we could time each bowl of cream- the one that was being hand beat and the one that was being electrically beat.

And guess what! They took exactly the same amount of time to turn into butter!

We noticed that when it started to turn into butter the cream went all curdly and then water started to gather in the bottom of the bowl. This water was butter milk. Or whey- as in curds and whey.
We pressed our butter down in a bowl to get rid of all the butter milk.
Once we were certain we had pressed out most of the butter milk we put our butter into a dish and got out our bread. We each buttered our own piece of bread and added sprinkles to make fairy bread!

It tasted delicious! Just like butter that you buy from the shop!

Cream starting to curdle

The "whey" that came out of our butter.

Ripper Rugby and Reading Tents

On Thursday Miss D'Ath went down to Napier to see what Nelson Park School get up to. It was a very cool chance to see what they get up to down there. It was also a chance to pick up a very cool reading tent which has seen a lot of reading visitors this week!

Last Friday there were not many people at school. That was because half of us were at the inter- schools Ripper Rugby tournament at the War Memorial Park in Wairoa.

It was a very chilly morning and all of our feet were frozen! Thankfully we went for a big run to warm ourselves up and then into our games.

I followed our Yr 3 & 4 team around and they were awesome. They focussed on passing the ball to the person nearest them instead of trying to find their friends.

We had some very speedy runners and all our players contributed in either tries or rips. We got into the plate shield final and were working well as a team in our last few games.

A very big thank you to all the parents who came and supported us. Especially Bernie who coached the team.

We all had a lot of fun.

Constructa-Bots and Biscuits.

Last week we had a visit from Miss Grover, and she had with her our very new and impressive Constructa Bots!

These Robots are specially for Room 2 and 3 and will help us with our navigation and programming.

We had a lot of fun programming our constructa bots and sending them to our friends on the mat.

The other week we sent our biscuits away in our "quickly" planned envelopes. They arrived back at school and all our biscuits had broken- apart from Miss D'Aths. We discussed that this was because we hadn't planned our designs very well and hadn't used our technology to "protect" our biscuits. 

So this week we planned some better materials to make our envelopes out of and planned how we could protect our biscuits round 2! We will let you know what condition they are in when they return! 

We hope you all have a good week and we shall update you next week with our latest technology challenge and our Ripper Rugby tournament.

Technology

This term we are focussing on Technology and "The big wide world".

In Room 3 we have been talking about how technology helps us and protects us. We looked at the every day things we do and investigated how an envelope protects our letters- what if we wanted to post someone a biscuit??

This led to us designing our own envelopes for our biscuits. We each had 2 sheets of A4 paper, and some cello tape. Round one saw Miss D'Ath being the postman, and accidentally dropping the mail bag a few times.... however I was much to kind a postman and none of our biscuits broke. That saw us investigating Round two- would our biscuits survive in our envelopes if we sent them in the mail for real?

We each redesigned our envelopes and popped our biscuits in and off to the mail box they went. It took them a week to head into...... (we're not sure how far they got- that's our next investigation) and finally they were back to us at school. Room 3 were pretty excited to open up our envelopes.............
but unfortunately all our biscuits were broken...... except for Miss D'Ath (who didn't cheat!) but had thought hard about the best way to package her biscuits.

Our biscuits back from their trip to the mail centre! 

Next step we are having a good hard think about how we could re package our biscuits and we will get them into the mail again... this time we will check with Trina, our mail lady, to see how far our biscuits are travelling!

Miss D'Ath's surviving biscuit!

Checking our biscuits.

Our Paper Planes

In Room 3 at the moment we are learning to write to inform someone about something.

Last week we found some instructions on how to make paper planes.
We followed the picture instructions and created our own paper planes. We then took them outside to see whose plane would go the furtherest. We decided it all depended on the wind and how you threw it. We have some very talented plane throwers!

Once we had finished flying our paper planes we decided that picture instructions were quite tricky to follow and that writing down the steps that we needed would make it a lot easier for someone else to follow.

Our Room 3 writers are improving every day and they made sure they added important words to their instructions, such as "folding it lengthways", and "make it into a triangle". With these important words included people would know how to make the best paper planes.

So if you are after a good set of instructions on how to make paper planes definitely come and see our Room 3 writers.

Whangawehi Planting and O'Briens Farm Visit

Today we were very lucky to spend the day out in the sunshine planting trees at Whangawehi and looking around the O'Briens Wetlands.

We started the morning off with tree planting at the Whangawehi river. The first tree we planted was a beautiful Totara tree in memory of Matua Edward. The children were very lucky to have learnt a lot from Matua Edward so it was very nice that they were able to show their appreciation with this tree.

Once we had finished planting the trees we were back into the bus and off to Pat and Sue O'Briens farm to look around their wetlands. When we arrived Sue (aka Mummy O'B) had a chat to us about what a wetland was and the importance of them. We learnt that wetlands are good for acting as a filter for our water- so all the water that is dirty from stock etc filters through the wetland and comes out a lot cleaner. Mummy O'B's wetland water comes out in the Whangawehi awa, so it is super important that it is clean.

On our walk around the wetlands we also had 16 trees to plant. We got stuck into this in peers, while the rest of us weeded around the plants which had been planted earlier. Tamariki were very lucky that they had the chance to explore areas further up the Whangawehi to help with their understanding of why we are protecting it.

A very big thank you to all the people who come and spend their time with us on our enviroschool days. We are so lucky you all come to share your knowledge with us all. Also a very big thank you to Pat and Sue O'Brien for allowing us to explore the wetlands and sharing your knowledge.