8 Gangling Arms

 Have you read the book "8 Gangling Arms"? We have! It is Sea Week so we read this book. 

We learned how to open an Explain Everything project so we could complete the tasks in it. 

We wrote rhyming words, we counted in Te Reo Māori, on some of of the pages we recorded our voices reading and we drew our own image of what we would sell in a trinket store.

We also drew sea creatures we know about.  What sea creatures would you draw?

Look and see what creatures Grace drew in her mahi today.

About Me

 In our Cybersmart lesson with Mrs Torrie we were learning how to use Explain Everything.

Explain Everything is an App on our iPads.

It is like a Whiteboard where you can draw, record voices, add images from lots of places.

Today we used the camera in Explain Everything to take a selfie, then we cropped our photo and resized it.

We also explored the pen tool and how to find more colours. 

Here is Flynn's mahi from today. 

Can you count how many different colours he wrote his name with?

Kawa of Care & our iPads

This year Room 4 are using iPads in their learning everyday.

We have started creating our Kawa of Care which helps us to use our iPads safely and efficiently.

Every week Mrs Torrie comes in for our Cybersmart lesson. 
Today we were learning how to use the Camera App on the iPad. 

We were also adding to our Kawa of Care.

Can you think of anything else we need in our Kawa of Care?

Room 4 2022

Welcome to 2022!

Here is Room 4!

We are a class of year 2 and 3 students who love to learn.

Mrs Naden is our teacher.

She was in Room 1 last year and now she is with us.

Parihaka

 This week we have been remembering Parihaka.

One hundred and fifty years ago there was a village in Taranaki called Parihaka. It lay between the Taranaki coast and Taranaki mountain. 

This village was special because people from many different Māori tribes had come to live there. Many had had their land confiscated and needed a safe place to live – to grow their food and raise their families. Parihaka was also a special place because it was a place of peace. 

The leaders of the village were Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi. They didn’t believe in fighting. They had heard the words of Jesus in the bible which said, “If anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well”. They told the people to put away their weapons. They told them that if government soldiers came to take their land, they should greet them with gifts. 

One early morning in Parihaka an important event occurred. The people were just beginning to move around the village when a large albatross came down to land on Tohu’s marae and left a feather there. The people believed that the albatross was a chiefly bird with much mana. By landing on Tohu’s marae, the albatross was indicating that Tohu was a great chief and the people should listen to him. The people began to follow the ways that Tohu taught them. And the albatross feather (or raukura) became an important sign for the people of Parihaka. 

The children of Parihaka were called tātarakihi which means ‘cicadas’. The older people said they sounded like cicadas because they chattered so much. The children had jobs to do at Parihaka. They helped to 

feed the hens and the pigs, and they helped to grow food in the gardens. They also played together and learned to dance and sing. 

One day Tohu and Te Whiti called the people to the marae, and told them: 

“Kua rere mai te kōrero ki ō mātou tāringa, āpōpō ka tae mai ngā hōia ki konei ki te raupatu i ō tātou whenua. Me noho tātou ki konei, ki runga i te marae ātea, tatari ai ki a rātou. Ka tunu ngā wāhine i te parāoa mā rātou , ka waiata hoki ngā tamariki ki te ope hōia.”  

“We have heard that the soldiers are coming tomorrow to try to make us leave our land. We will sit here on the marae and wait for them. The women will bake bread for them and the children will sing and dance.” 

So, late into the night the people of Parihaka prepared for the soldiers to come. Just before the sun rose the children went out onto the road leading into the village. When the soldiers arrived with their guns they saw the children of Parihaka singing and dancing in the road with albatross feathers in their hair. 

The children couldn’t stop the soldiers from entering the village and taking the men to prison, but they made the soldiers ashamed of their swords and their guns. No-one was killed in Parihaka that day because the people refused to fight the soldiers with weapons. Instead they stood up to them with courage and mana. Sometimes the descendants of the people of Parihaka wear albatross feathers to remember the dignity of their tūpuna and how they resisted giving up their land without using violence.

(from the  Caritas resource)

We made raukura using our Google Tools. Check our individual blogs to see them.

What do you know about Parihaka?

Frida Kahlo

Towards the end of last term and beginning of this term, we have been learning about Frida Kahlo.  She was a Mexcian painter who painted self portraits. In her portraits, she usually painted herself with bushy eyebrows and moustaches. Did you know she had polio when she was 6 year olds and walked with a limp for the rest of her life? She was also in a bus crash when she was 18 years old. Her injuries were so severe that she spent many weeks in the hospital. She felt physical pain throughout her life. That's when she started to paint.

The painting tecniques we used were:

• to use both sides of the paintbrush
• to use long brush strokes
• to mix colours to create the colour we wanted

We used lots of colourful paints to paint her face. To make the flower(s) on her head, we used tissue paper. We folded the tissue paper back and forth like a fan. Then we stapled the middle and then fanned the paper out to make it look like a flower.

Zombie Apocalypse!

We have spent the last week of term trying to survive a zombie apocalypse! When we arrived at school on Monday, there was Crime Scene tape around our classroom, our classroom had been trashed and the desks and chairs had been tipped upside down, and there was zombie slime EVERYWHERE! Then our teacher gave us a scenario to work from:

The world has been infected by a deadly venom. The source of the venom is unknown, but what is known is that 92% of the world’s population is now dead. An unexpected side effect of the venom is that it has caused those who have fallen, to rise again with an insatiable hunger for the flesh of the living. 

How would we survive? 

Each day we were given a new piece of the story and a new set of parameters that were added to the list of existing rules. We had to brainstorm "Things to consider," and then adapt to these parameters in order to survive. We learnt how to purify water, make forts, search for food in the wild, and make a bow and arrow. Great survival skills for any situation. 

Here's the scenarios we were given...

Luckily, we survived just in time for the holidays!