Letter from the Prime Minister

Last term we read a book about a refugee boy called Ahmet. The book was called The Boy at the Back of the Class. It made us curious to find out more about the refugee crisis and especially what New Zealand does about it. You may have read about this on our previous individual blogs.

After researching facts, we brainstormed ways New Zealand could improve its response to the needs of the refugees. Then everyone wrote individual letters to our Prime Minister, Jacinda Adern.

She replied!

The Sacraments

In R.E. we are learning about the Sacraments - Hākarameta. Sacraments are a time in which we encounter Christ in a special way. They make the invisible, visible. 

Sacraments are ways God is with us in our lives. God does not want to be distant from the people he creates and loves so much. Each time a Sacrament is celebrated, God is present among his people.

There are 7 Sacraments in the Catholic Church: Baptism, Reconciliation, Confirmation, Eucharist, Marriage, Holy Orders and Anointing of the Sick.

This week we have been talking about the Sacraments of Initiation. These Sacraments welcome you into church. We talked about the symbols and rituals of these Sacraments and then created our own Google Slide to show our understanding.

Here is a sneak preview of what you will find on our individual blogs...

The Assumption of Mary

Tomorrow is the Assumption of Mary. When the apostles heard that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was going to be taken from this world, they gathered at her house and kept watch with her.  

After she died, Mary was buried in a tomb. When the apostles opened the tomb again, her body was gone. Jesus had come with his angels and taken her up to heaven as the beginning and image of the Church coming to perfection, and a sign of sure hope and comfort to God’s people.

Why would God take Mary’s body and soul into heaven? 

Mary is special to God: she said “Yes” to becoming the mother of Jesus.  God also wanted to show us that one day, all of us will share in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Mary is the first person in the Church to experience the resurrection in its fullness.

You will not find this story in the Bible. However, the story has been retold and handed down through the generations by people retelling it to their whānau, as well as reading stories about it.

We made word clouds of Mary by using https://www.wordclouds.com/ but we are having problems because it won't accept all of our words even though we have resized them. Does anyone know how to fix it? If you do, you could leave a comment for us and then we will be able to post our Mary Word Clouds on our blogs.

Selina's Faith GIF and Quality Blog Post

 We have been working with Mrs Torrie in our Cybersmart lessons on Quality Blog Posts. Last week we turned our Faith posters into a GIF. This week we expanded our ideas in our blog post so that the reader got more of an understanding about Faith and also the digital skills we used. We wanted our blog post to sound more like talking instead of a few short sentences.

Here is Selina's work. After reading it do you have more idea of Faith and what it means? You could let Selina know by commenting on her blog here.

This week and last week our class have been learning how to make a GIF. We used Tall Tweets to make our GIFs. We had to use the Classic one. I really liked how it worked out really great, and it looks great too.
The reason why I have chosen to do the GIF on the the faith poster, was because I am showing that I know what faith is and what it means to me. Also because it is our term 3 value. Each term we have different words. We learn about them. They are special words to us because we are a Catholic school. Faith means trusting in God even if you can't see him. God will always be there for you. Some people aren't Catholic but it doesn't stop me, because God will never leave your side.
I found it challenging to finish the slide on time because I did my faith poster on a google drawing. I had to do my faith poster on the slide for the GIF because on GIFs. They move, and they make people stop and look at the GIF.
Have you made a GIF before? If so, please comment and tell me. I can share it to my classmates.

July Reflection

We are reflecting on the learning that happened in July. 

It's great to sit and think about all the things we have done. It's a time to celebrate our learning and think about where we are heading to next (our next steps in learning). You can read our reflections on individual  blogs.

Here's Francesca's...

Tairāwhiti Enviro Centre

This week we went to the Tairāwhiti Enviro Centre where we learnt about edible gardens, composting, where our landfill goes, how to have waste free lunch boxes, how to hold a waste free disco and the importance of refusing plastic. We discovered that there's even plastic in tea bags now! We also learnt that the trucks transport our rubbish to a landfill that is 5 hours away, and that an old landfill in Te Araroa spewed out into the river after a huge rain storm. It polluted the water so they were unable to collect kai from the river. 

Composting was also very interesting as we learnt how to layer our compost with green waste then brown waste then water. The brown waste strops its from smelling and having air around your compost also helps.

Lots of photos were taken so that afternoon Mrs Torrie came and showed us how to create a photo collage in Google Slides or Canva so our blogs have style. This means that you don't have to keep scrolling on our blog pages to see all the photos. If we make a collage you can see all our photos at once.

We used photos from either our Drive or Chromebook so some people made collages of our Enviro Centre trip, others made them of our rat traps and some even created collages of celebrations we have had in class.

R.E. Challenge

This week, we have been set a challenge. We had to create a poster displaying this term's school value FAITH, WHAKAPONO. We talked about what faith looks like, feels like and sounds like. We discussed synonyms for faith and searched the Bible and the internet for quotes. Then we started creating our posters. The challenge finishes on Friday so we will have our posters up on our individual blogs by then.