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

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.