Personal Passion Projects - Part One

This week we have started Personal Passion Projects. The idea is that the kids choose something that they have wondered about, are passionate about or are fascinated by. They start with a 'fat' question - a question that is wide - eg 'what can I find out about planets in the solar system?' or "what's the story behind the Great Wall of China?"
Once everyone had their 'fat' question they wrote down what they already knew about the topic. After that the next step was to write some 'skinny' questions about what they wanted to find out. We talked about where they could find the information they needed and then it was research time.......

                              

When all the research has been done and the questions all answered it will be time to think of an interesting way of presenting their work. This could be in any form that suits the topic and the child from models to speeches to online presentations like a slide show or an imovie to posters - the list is endless.  Each child will present their findings to the rest of the class and hopefully we'll      all be inspired by each other's passions and learn some new things along the way.

I Wish I Was Day

Today we had 'I wish I was... ' day to raise money for Hawera Intermediate. We dressed up as rock stars, horse riders, fashion designers, vets, doctors, farmers, animals and lots more cool things. Don't we all look Fabulous!!!!!!

Chicken Update!

Over the last term, there has been a lot happening over at the chicken area. First Mr Hancock came and built a new run for our baby chickens. We have a separate shed and run for our babies and our big chickens so that they don't fight and peck each other. 

  

  

Now that our chicken venture has grown we found we needed a place to store all the food and chicken stuff. Mr Wisnewski came and built us a fabulous storage shed.  Now we can keep all our stuff in there and fit everything in. 

  

The whole area is starting to look great. We have planted a garden full of silver beet and spinach for the chicks. We have a tractor tyre which we are going to plant with flowers and greens for the chickens as well. 

We have dug out paths which are going to be filled with tiles made by Room 2, we have painted the shed and used blackboard paint on the doors so we can write messages to everyone who visits the chooks. 

Yesterday Roy donated a table and bench that he has made out of pallets. 

We are really proud of this area and love spending time over there with our chickens.

By Heidi and Pascoe

Fancy Flowers

Earlier this week, Aylah brought in some flowers that she had dyed with food colouring . They looked fabulous because the dye had gone through the veins of the flowers and made them look very pretty. So today we decided we'd like to dye some other flowers and see what happened. The rhododendron that Porsche is holding was white, now it is a beautiful blue. We still have lots of different flowers in test tubes and we're waiting anxiously to see what happens to them......  

Room 4's Assembly Presentation

Wild Self Challenge

One of our recent Friday Challenges involved using the website http://www.buildyourwildself.com/  to create a creature with special features. Children had to design their creature and explain why they picked the body parts they did. They then got into pairs and wrote a story together. The story had to include their 'wildself' and a problem that their creature could solve thanks to its special features.

Visit the individual blogs to see the wild creatures and the great story writing.  Here's the beginning of a couple of stories to whet your appetite......

Down in the forest where the flowers all bloomed, the trees all stood still as the animals watched the Fru Fru Olympics in the village of Fru Fru Trees . The wind whistled past as the sun beamed brightly on the athletes as they got ready to compete.....

This is the beginning of Isabel and Arnika's story.

Jordan and Liam's story starts like this....

Crawler and Jobro were strolling along a rocky mountain track where you could see the blue sky and the cityscape and it was beautiful until zap pow bang. They ended up running for their lives from a gigantic boulder that was pushed down by an evil goblin.

Room 4 Learning Stars - Our Treaty

Over the last term our class has changed quite a bit -  three children have left and four children have started! We decided it was time to review the Toko Learning Stars and what they mean in Room Four.

Toko School Learning Stars

Brainstorm of our Ideas

As a group we brainstormed all our ideas and decided we'd turn these ideas into a class treaty.



Everyone had different ideas around how we could display our treaty so the children  put themselves into groups and choose what programme or format they would like to use to create our class treaty.

Charlie and Oli decided to design a poster that included
a chicken since Rm 4 is the chicken class.

Courtney and Taitania made a book-creator on the Ipad, Jordan
and Mason made a puppet pals movie, while Brock and
Liam used Google Docs to create their treaty.

Judah and Thomas used the drawing programme
in Google Drive to create their treaty.

Mackenzie C and Isabel decided to create a poster. They drafted their ideas on paper and then used the computer to type them up and display them with color.

We decided that we would vote on the best one and use that as our class treaty. To be successful children needed to include: the words we'd brainstormed, bright colours, clear font or writing, be creative and make sure their product represented Room 4.

Here are the finished products

Pippa, Mackenzie W and Sophie's poster

Pascoe, Arnika and Renee's poster

Ephraim's Wordle 

Judah and Thomas' poster from Google Draw

Oli and Charlie's poster

Liam and Brock's Google Doc Poster

Emma and Aylah's Word Doc Poster

Isabel and Mackenzie C's Word Poster

Taitania and Courtney put their treaty together in book-creator

Jordan and Mason produced these two puppet pal videos that show being kind and not being kind.

Oli and Charlie's poster and Isabel and Mackenzie C's poster were voted the two finalists but in the end we decided to display all ten treaties and we signed all ten treaties. That means we now have ten different ways to remind ourselves what it looks like to be a Learning Star in Room 4! We have agreed to remind each other in a nice way if someone forgets our treaty agreement.