Sketching Wolves

For the past two weeks, we have been learning how to sketch using a 5 point tonal scale. Using our 6B sketching pencils, we followed Mark Crilley's YouTube tutorial on how to sketch a wolf. 

We were so excited and proud of our results that many of us carried on at home, and also came to school early to do more before school started.

                       

Rat/Stoat Trap Update

The rain finally cleared and it was a beautiful day to go down to our Rerenga Awa to do a quick clean up of rubbish, see how the new natives we planted are doing, and check out our traps to see if the rats liked the dog biscuits we laid as bait. And they answer is.....NO! The traps have not been touched. We're going to reset them again with a rotten egg. The white trap that Josh is holding in the photo had cheese - it looks like they didn't like that either. We still can't find the peanut butter container on Mrs Naden's desk so she will bring in some more...unless someone has some nutella at home they could give us a scoop of?
We'll also have to do some weeding around the natives when it's not so boggy.

                                                        Mrs Naden's own 'rats nest'! 
                                                       (where is the peanut butter jar?)

Chemistry

This term we have been learning about chemical reactions and finding out about mixtures, substances, reversible and irreversible change.
For today's experiment, we made gummy worms. Now we are using appropriate words and phrases to exlplain what happened.

Saints and Inspiring People

In R.E. we are learning about saints and inspiring people. Today we learnt about St Maximillian Kolbe:

We were amazed that he gave up his life for a friend. Now we are busy researching other saints and inspiring people. We are focusing on:

• how the saint was treated by other people and why;
• what they did that inspires us and why they are good role models for us today;
• finding out why they are a saint;
• identifying the way they responded to Te Wairua Tapu (the Holy Spirit) and followed Jesus;
• would being a saint be easy? Why/why not?

Our research will be collated into a report on our chosen saint.

Rat/Stoat Trap Update

Today we went and checked out the rat/stoat trap we have set in the Rerenga Awa. We are trying to catch rats and stoats because they are eating the native berries, seeds and insects down in our native reserve. How do we know they are down there? We set tracking tunnels last year and found rat and mice footprints in them. 
It's been a while since we've been down because when we scheduled it in, it was raining, then we got side tracked with our science experiments. We were puzzled to find that something had made a nest in the trap. Mrs Naden and Mrs McCormack got some bark and fossicked under all the fluff and feathers...

But it wasn't fluff and feathers...it was...a decomposed rat! We thought the stench had been the rotten egg we had put in as bait! 

If you look closely, the thing that looks like a stick on the bottom left hand of the photo is actually its tail, and you can see its two claws! Luckily there was some wild mint growing, so we picked it and smelt it so the revolting smell would clear from our nostrils.
We have read that dog biscuits is good bait so we are trying that instead of a rotten egg. We also set our other rat trap but the peanut butter has gone missing from Mrs Naden's table. We got some cheese from the staffroom fridge (sorry teachers - you will be one piece less at morning tea time tomorrow!) and have set that one by the fence line because we think the rats like scurrying up and down it. We will keep you posted on how we go. We now know that we need to keep checking the traps every two weeks and not get side tracked. (although seeing a decomposed rat was pretty awesome!)

Learning About Change

Have you ever wondered how crystals are formed? This week we explored how they are made, conducted a science experiment, then read and wrote about what happened.

The technical language (key words) we learnt and used were:

• dissolve
• observation
• evaporate
• crystal forming chemical
• solution
• atom

 Our crystals are growing in our room

Can you explain what happened and why?

Mother's Day

In Writing this week, we wrote ten things we love about our mothers. We had to include specific nouns, adjectives, juicy verbs and a simile. Then we went onto the festisite, selected the Valentine image and typed our poems in. After that, we had to problem solve how to get our poem back into our drive ready to print to put inside our Mother's Day Card.
Here's Jemima's poem for her mother: