Community As Home - Visual Art Project

As part of our Year 4-8 Visual Art Cultural Group  over the past term, we have been 'Learning, Creating, Sharing' together to complete three final designs that will be on display at Keri Downs Park in Papakura by mid December 2016. 

Check out the slideshow below to see the different stages of the project... 

We will add the photo's of the A2 sized signs once they're up, too!

Learning: Topic Inquiry via Padlet

Learning: Our Wanderings About the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil

This week, we had a KWL discussion about some of the non-human creatures we might find in the tropical rain forest around the 2016 Olympics city of Rio, Brazil...

Here is some of what we already know:
“It is in South America, in the same country as Rio, Brazil. There are anacondas - a huge snake - and piranhas in it. There are crocodiles, and poison frogs - they are blue and orange and red.” ~ Travis
“The proper name for a jungle is a rain forest.” ~ Sharlotte
“There is a type of big cat called a jaguar that lives in the Amazon.” ~ Aaliyah
“There is another cat called a puma that lives in South America.” `~ Ngatokoa

We look forward to sharing our independent research Google Slide efforts with you on our individual blogs later this term! :-)

Sharing: "Food For Thought" Health Topic

In Term 2, we did "Food For Thought" with Nicky from the Heart Foundation. 
This morning, we completed our own interactive Google Draw to show our understanding of healthy eating food groups... Here's an example modeled by the teacher, that we 'modified' and used to share our understanding on our own individual student blogs!

Learning and Creating: Native Bird Drawings

Our whole hub topic-linked visual arts lesson on Friday of this week...

Breaking the images into shapes we could replicate ourselves...

The E1 class group sketching their own versions...

A couple of our finished sketches - well done!!!

Our Initial 'Wanderings': Term 2 Topic Inquiry

Our Class Brainstorm!

Learn, Create, Share: All About Us

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Learning: Literacy Lyrics

On the afternoon of 17th November, we found out about some really awesome songs that we can listen to and watch on YouTube that will help us to remember our spelling rules... So we thought we'd share them with you, too!

W.A.L.H.T. spell and use homophones...

W.A.L.H.T. spell the long vowel sound-letters correctly by using the'silent E'...

There's also this one that tells you some word phrases you can use to make your good writing EVEN BETTER by helping your reader to VISUALISE...

W.A.L. what good writers do...

Wearable Arts Fashion Show - 2015

The Wearable Arts Fashion show was held at school. The students showcased their creations of the Fabrics, Fibres and Fashion Inquiry. The students of Whanakitanga Whare researched, designed and created their own masks and outfits. All the materials used were recycled materials. They were only supported by the teachers, rest was done by the children, for the children. This is a very good example of LEARN CREATE SHARE!!!

Creating: The Next Step in Our Term 3 Topic Inquiry

Earlier this week, we watched a video on "How to Make a Papier Mache Mask", which was shared with us by our teacher. It was selected in response to a couple of the Inquiry Questions our class came up with for our "Fabrics, Fibres and Fashion" topic this term. (You can watch the video here if you would like to see it, too). 

Ms Osborne suggested we could use a "reduce, re-use, recycle" approach to creating an item for our fashion show later this month - by using materials we have around us in our community, such as old newspapers, plastic milk containers and home made flour and water glue... 

...to make ourselves an African "Igbo Ijele" styled mask that we could then personalise to reflect the vibrant and exciting culture around us! Now that we have made our papier mache bases for our masks, we will use some of our design ideas that we made to paint these to match.

Our next step will be to ask ourselves: what reusable or recyclable materials do we have available around us? How could we use some of these to decorate our masks to reflect our own unique cultural 'fashion' ideas?

Learning: Our Term 3 Topic Inquiry 'Wanderings'

WALHT create our own 'wanderings' for our new topic.
Inquiry Topic: Fabric, Fibres and Fashion.
This afternoon in class, we brainstormed ideas together about our Term 3 Inquiry Learning topic. We asked ourselves: What do we want to know? And here are the 'wanderings' we came up with... 
What are our school uniforms made out of?  Nepia & Colsey
What are jackets made out of? What makes them waterproof? Denzel
How do we do a fashion show? Fatu
How do we find out about fashion show stuff? Onyx
How do we walk down the stage? Colsey
How do we print a t-shirt? Colsey
How does the t-shirt design process work? Lyric
Are police jackets and hats made out of denim? Colsey and Nepia
How do you make hats out of denim? Nepia
What kind of art do they use to make fashion designs? Nevaeh
How do you design and make:
- a mask? Athens & Onyx
- jewellery? Krystal & Jazarehus
- leather and denim jackets / chino pants? Fatu
- a dress and a mask (for a ball)? Shania & Shelby

...As you can tell from our ideas, we're ALL really looking forward to creating items for our upcoming whole school fashion show here at Red hill school later this term!

Poetic Writing

For our creative writing lessons, we have been learning how to use our describing words to express our responses to the things we have been learning about during the course of our integrated studies. 

What is extra special about this heartfelt poem written by Lyric, is that she has written at home, in her own time, and because she wanted to share her thoughts and feelings about these brave men in a poem she could share with the rest of us at school!

Our poems were written at the beginning of Term 2, when our whole school had been learning all about the ANZAC soldiers in the lead up to the 100 year commemorations of Gallipoli this ANZAC Day. 

In E1, we had been developing our own understanding of what life may have been like for our fallen soldiers, and how they made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. 

Lyric's poem is a great example of how her own response to what she had learned around this topic allowed her to create an extremely thoughtful piece using poetic writing. 

Well done, Lyric!

Our Online Research for Our Flight and Innovation Topic Studies

In Whanakitanga Tahi, we have been learning about Matariki over the past fortnight. We found out that, as part of the celebrations for this, people may choose to make and fly kites!

So, this morning, we used the PCs in Amua Whare ICT, and we went on to Google to find some "How To" answers about this for our upcoming Innovation Day activities. 

As part of our latest ICT lesson around "Learn, Create, Share" activities, we were learning how to create an Email to share our selected websites (i.e.: by copying and pasting the website address hyperlink into the body of the Email). We then Emailed our chosen answer websites to our classroom teacher, so that we could use these to inform our technology activities.

We had two questions to ask - the first one was "How do you make a kite?" and the second question was "How do you make a parachute?". Here are some of the websites we chose to share by Email when looking for our answers to these online:

Shelby shared 
Why Make Your Own Kite?

Detroit shared 
How To Make A Kite

Shania shared 
How To Make A Diamond Kite

Krystal, Fatu and Nevaeh shared 
How To Build Kites To Suit YOU

Denzel and Lahrenzo shared 
Make Your Own Kite!

Athens shared 
How To Build A Plastic Parachute

E1 are looking forward to using their findings to co-construct instructions together using what we have found out to write an explanation, once we have had the chance to create our own kites (and maybe even parachutes!) in Whanakitanga Whare during wider Innovation Day activities tomorrow!

Our Inquiry Learning 'Wanderings' About Flight:

"How does a helicopter stay in the air?" - asked by Nepia.
"How does a jet plane's engine work?" - asked by Shania.
"How do you fly a hot air balloon?"  - asked by Shelby.
"How do they keep or fix the planes when they've finished moving people?"  - asked by Colsey.
"How long can planes fly for?" - asked by Lahrenzo.
"How do firework rockets fly?" - asked by Onyx.
"Why did the Wright brothers want to invent the first plane?" - asked by Lyric.
"Why is a space rocket bigger than an aeroplane?" - asked by Fatu.
"Why do aeroplanes need an engine?" - asked by Denzel.
"Why doesn't gravity stop planes from flying up so high?" - asked by Chaye.

Welcome to our Jungle

This jungle themed classroom display was inspired by the animal cards available at the supermarket. The students had lots to talk about and then decided to research a wide range of animals. They learnt, created and shared their projects with each other in the jungle.