Looking back... Moving forward

"Sorry future generation."
This is the focus of this emotionally complex video. We can change this. Because we owe it to the trees.

Click here (Prince Ea Sorry) to Stand Up For Trees!

Looking back ...

Centennary activity - photos through the decades

Hi everyone

As part of our centenary celebrations we are having a photo shoot and parade of fashions through the last 100 years.  The photos will be on display at the Mapua Community Hall during the centenary weekend celebrations and the parade and class reports from each decade will be part of our assembly on the 11th of September.

Classes are taking a particular decade and researching the clothing, events, pastimes and points of interest from that time.   Room 8 are going to be researching and gearing up to represent 1910 - 1919.  Does anyone have (or know where we can get our hands on) clothing or artefacts from this decade that we could borrow for this occasion.

I thought this youTube clip might give you some inspiration.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Speech competition time is here!

Room 8 is going to working on writing and delivering a speech.  We will have a mini speech competition with the other Year 5 and 6s at Mapua to decide who goes forward to the district speech competition.

If you want to find out more - topics and judging criteria - click on the image below.

Wish us luck.

Bamboozables

What are Bamboozables you ask? Bamboozables are a saying/phrase that is made up of a display of words, in an interesting way. The object is to figure out the meaning of the puzzle. here is an example:

Answers:
1. think twice about it
2. walk on water
3. space invaders
4. free your mind
5. keep on smiling
6. it doesn't add up

Click here to go to the Bamboozables web page!

By Jacob

Interschools

On Thursday the 21st of May, children all over Mapua woke up with either a feeling of dread or excitement. Interschools day! After a about 40 minutes in their classroom with their stomachs in a knot of nerves, they headed down to the big tree for a quick briefing before hopping into their cars and driving down to Rabbit Island picnic area. Everyone rushed over to walk the course before their race and came back even more nervous than before. When it came to a new race, a flood of children rushed over to the start line, being careful not to get their spikes stuck in rope. Ready, steady, GO! The children surged forward, running hard for the lead.


ROOM EIGHTS CROSS COUNTRY WINNERS.
There was only one Year 5 girl from Room 8 in the Year 5 girls race: Cassie, who came 11th the Year 5 boys, Charlie and Liam came in at 6th and 7th with Bo and Luca not far behind. Kaze placed 8th in the Year 6 boys and Macy placed 10th in the Year 6 girls.

The people that got through to the next round are very excited and are training as often as they can. Even if you didn't get through to the next round, everyone tried their best and had lots of fun climbing the steep banks, sprinting down the other side and jogging through the grass.

by Macy Morgan

Funny Faces

If you had walked into Room 8 while we were drawing cartoons, you would hear laughter and see 23 smiling faces. After quickly arranging ourselves into our art table groups, we got to work practicing drawing cartoon eyes, noses, mouths and ears. Once we had perfected our techniques we grabbed a piece of good paper and lightly drew our faces on the paper in pencil before going over our designs in sharpie or vivid. Finally, the fun part! Using a straw and coloured dye we blew our choice of colour onto our piece of paper to make hair or a beard on our drawings. Carefully we carried them to a safe place to dry before they were put up on the window, where we can see them every day when we come into our colourful classroom.

By Macy Morgan

DEAR, DEAW, DEAD

In room 8, after morning tea, we have been doing something called 'DEAR DEAW OR DEAD'. This is an activity that we have to participate in. 'DEA' means Drop Everything And. Then 'R' 'W' 'D' means Read, Write and Draw.

 Some people do quick, simple drawings while others go into detail. Some people write short stories, while others spread the story over many days. Some people read short books, while others read long novels.

We all enjoy this amazing activity!

By Jacob

Stuff That People Do At Lunchtime

At lunchtimes, Room 8, and the rest of the school, are busy doing all sorts of interesting things;
- playing ball-tag, cheat and other playground games,
- manhunt, tag and other whole school games,
- playing fun mini games with juniors and middles in the sandpit,
- doing lunchtime activities like Kapahaka, Ukelele and Library duties,
- or walking aimlessly around with friends

We have been doing some pretty cool stuff at lunchtimes!

By Jacob

Spelling to the MAX!

In Room 8 we have been working on the 'C', 'K' and 'CK' sounds in spelling. Here are some of our rules!

-use 'CK' after a short vowel: back, peck, thick, sock
-use 'K' after a consonant letter, long vowel or vowel pair: park, peek, cake
-if we use a 'K' we use 'I' or 'E' after it: kit, kill, ken
-if we use a 'C' we use 'A' 'O' or 'U' after it: cat, core, cut ( sometimes those last two rules don't apply but we haven't learnt about those. )

We use dictionaries to find 'C' 'K' and 'CK' words. We then use the words we've found and spell them. Hope you enjoyed reading about our spelling.

For our writing we have been writing ANZAC diaries by soldiers, or nurses, in The Gallipoli Campaign. We have been writing primarily about life in the trenches and battlefields. Some people chose to write about blood and gore, while others wrote about the hospitals This was mainly those writing as nurses. Some soldiers chose to opt out of the battle for a seemingly quieter life on beds in hospital tents with walls that blocked out the sound of deafening explosions and blood curdling screams of the battlefield.

These are some entries from various authors:

28th April 1915
It has been pouring with rain. We have been busy all night putting triage tags on wounded soldiers. We saved the red tagged soldiers immediately, but those with black tags sadly passed away. There was no way to move with all the dead bodies lying around in the hospital tent.
entry by Lily Hendriksen

1st June 1915
I have been awarded a medal! But I have been shot in the leg. It's just gutzer! I got the medal for bravery because when I got shot in the leg I just forgot about it and kept fighting on.

During the battle I remember a cricket ball sized grenade being thrown into our trench. Luckily for me, its fuse was burning slowly so I picked it up and threw it back into the turks trench before it exploded. I felt lucky because I didn't get blown to pieces but I feel sad for all the turks I must have killed.

I don't like war, it's terrible! All you do is shoot people. The trenches stink. I stink! I am always getting the Gallipoli Gallop. Trying to find a spot to go to the loo, sometimes I cant find anywhere to go and I end up having to pee my pants. I cant wash my clothes or myself because there is so little water and no bathroom facilities . I have to wait until I get down to the beach and wash myself in the sea.
entry by Kouta Roberts

Glossary of Kouta's entry

Gutzer: Horrible
Gallipoli Gallop: Trying to find a toilet in the trenches

Blog post by Jacob

Soldier diaries

25 April 1915

The sound of bombs exploding nearby, the whizz of bullets flying past. It was deafening...

For a while, Room 8 has been reading like mad to find out exactly what happened at Gallipoli in the awful war. We learnt about the disgusting, hard biscuits the soldiers were given as part of their tiny rations and the awful trenches, full of disease. We are planning to use this information to write a soldier's or nurse's diary. The diary will include important information about this awful war. We can't wait to start writing the diaries!

Gratitude

Gratitude.

I am grateful for... At the moment Room 8 is learning about gratitude for DEAW. After morning tea time we come in and get out our gratitude journals. The first thing that we put in our journals was a list of all the things we were grateful for and the things that made us different. Some common things were our family, culture and friends. For the next two days we wrote about what happened at morning tea and what we appreciated from our break time. Some of the spelling was a little bit difficult but with the help of our friends and teacher we managed to spell some very tricky words.

What is War?

On the 29th of April Luca’s Dad, Bayard, came into Room Eight to talk to us about his ancestors who fought in World War One and the Boer War.

We learnt all about SS Ceramic, the ship that sank when it was shot down by a German submarine. Did you know that six hundred and fifty four people died! Only one lucky person survived. The Boer war was in South Africa from 1901-1903. Luca’s Great Great Great Grandfather fought in it and won many, many cool medals. We got to see heaps of precious medals for bravery, the first 100,000 to enlist and lots more. One of our favourites was a medal with a rainbow string and one that looked a bit like a little bronze star. We found out that the Victoria Cross is the best medal to get because it meant that you were extremely brave. We enjoyed the speech very much and thank you to Bayard for giving up his time to teach us about his family.

The Scale Of The Universe

This website is a great way to get the feel of how amazingly massive the universe really is. It goes both ways though, as the minuscule things are the most important of all! It goes all the way down to a tiny 0.0000000001 yocto-metres! From the whopping known universe to the space-time fabric of everything, this is a truly awesome website. Click on the link at the 'websites to check out' down at your left.

Cross Country training

Lately, Room Eight has been doing a run every day. We also do three songs of Jump Jam with the rest of the school in the morning. The run takes us from the school all the way to the beach and back then once around the bund. Some people zoom right to the front and some people stay behind and pace themselves by running ten or twenty posts and then walking five. The run is 1.35 kilometers long and is very fast (most of the time).

The Jump Jam songs are a fun thing to do every morning (before the run in the afternoon) and often warm people up quite a lot! So far the songs have been very ‘feel good’ sort of songs and everyone often sings along to the songs that they know. Some year 7 and 8 students are up the front helping all the little kids along, while the rest of the school stay back and dance their hearts out!

When we do our fitness activities we all give it a go and do our best at everything, as well as getting ready for the Mapua School Cross Country event on the 8th of May 2015. We are taking this event very seriously and we have all set our own personal goals and we are all trying hard to achieve them in a set time frame (before the cross country). We also have been filling in a run log by entering the date, where we go to, distance today and the total distance we have run.

Our class is now impervious to the endless fear and tiredness of the cross country!

By Jacob  

Stuff that happens in Room 8 : )

On Tuesday 17th February we had a pretty exciting day. We had Nicole and Tracy, two surf life saving women, in to talk to us about how to have a fun, safe time in or around the water.

To be safe we need to remember:

• Always have an adult watching you when you are swimming
• Never swim in a rip
• If there are life guards, always swim between the flags
• Be sensible when swimming, check for currents, rocks and rips
• Slip, slop, slap and wrap

Tracy and Nicole took  a session in the pool and they held two boards on top of each other and we swam through the waves they made with the boards.  We then got to put two boards together and stood on them. We got into groups and practiced rescuing one another with life guard flotation belts.

 That was in the morning and in the afternoon we had a scientist called Richard De Hamel talking to us about how the Māori survived, made fish hooks and how they made carvings. He told us lots of  stories about how he proved that the Maori fish hooks were an effective, clever design. It was a funny story because he was a bit naughty - he fished in the aquarium.  He did release the fish once he proved that the hooks worked.

By Ashlee

Room 8 Wonders!

On the last day of the holidays we were all thinking about what tomorrow would bring.

When the Room 8 students arrived at school the next day, they all saw what was going to be their classroom for the next year. It was the same Room 8 as last year on the outside, but the inside was amazing!

There was a bookshelf bulging with books on every subject possible! There was music blasting from the awesome interactive whiteboard. We all started dancing when we heard the awesome song. There was welcome to Room Eight 2015 written neatly across the normal whiteboard!
After our awe had passed on, the bell rang and we all sat down at our neat, tidy desks. The music stopped and our new teacher emerged from behind her desk. Mrs Hosie walked swiftly to the front of the class and introduced herself by telling us her Mihi (a Mihi is a Maori introduction).

Two minutes later we were all settling down to learn how to create quick, eye-catching title pages. They looked awesome! At the end of the day we all went home to our parents and told them of the wonders of Room 8.

By Jacob

Tackling the tryathalon

Wheeling in your bike through the gate, looking around for the line to get the safety check to make sure your helmet was sitting in the right place and so nothing will happen when you're doing laps of the field. Some of us feeling anxious, some feeling excited and some feeling quite confident that they were going to do well in this year's triathlon.

Looking down the row,  everybody taking their positions - on your marks, get set, go! We were off running hard forgetting we were meant to pace ourselves, everybody wrestling for the front. Parents filling up the side lines, clicking away on their cameras. People were zooming past on their bikes from the race before us. Coming up was where you had to jump on your bike and do three laps of the field (if you were a Year 5 or 6 student.). Once you had finished biking, you had to jump into the ice cold pool and swim four lengths. Then, it was off to the finish line to join your friends.

Finally it was time for awards. Everyone was talking excitedly about who would get what.
Then the microphone piped up and everyone fell silent as Mr Chalmers started saying what a great day it had been. Finally, first, second, and third were read out for each age group.  After they were awarded their certificates they posed for a photo. After that it was all over for another year and we were given a long morning tea.

By Emma