Poppies from different perspectives

Painting poppies

Remembering at Ruapotaka

As ANZAC Day falls during the school holidays, Ruapotaka held a special assembly on Friday to remember all the soldiers and nurses who travelled to foreign lands to serve New Zealand during World War I. We remembered by wearing our poppies and by listening to students read poems. Prudence read her ANZAC poem on behalf of Room 10.

Remembering at the museum

As ANZAC Day approaches, we have been remembering all the things we experienced and learnt about last year when it was the 100th Anniversary of the landing of New Zealand and Australian soldiers at Gallipoli. Yesterday we visited Auckland War Memorial Museum with Room 9 as part of our learning. Although the Minecraft exhibition about Gallipoli had gone, we explored the trenches, equipment and weaponry the soldiers used and thought about the challenges they faced living and fighting in a foreign land.

I think the answer is .....

Mrs Pine, the Maths lady, visited Room 10 last week to find out how we are getting along talking about maths and solving maths problems. Since then we have begun to challenge ourselves with one problem for the whole class to solve. To make this easier, we are all learning to share our maths thinking and take time to listen to each other as we work in smaller groups.

3, 2, 1 ... Welcome to our Duffy Role Model!

We welcomed a Duffy role model to a special assembly yesterday afternoon. Ravinder works as a researcher at Maori TV, a sports writer and has presented a boxing event on Sky TV. She is also a netball coach and a mum. It was inspiring when she told us about all the reading and learning she loves to do as part of her work.  As she presented some learners with Duffy books, she mentioned that she still has all the Duffy books she was given at school!  Ka mau te wehi!

S'more sun required!

The sun shone brightly on our solar ovens yesterday as we tried to cook pizza and chips using the sun's energy. We left the food in the ovens for an hour before lunch and the results varied for different groups. Everyone's shoestring chips were warm but as some pizzas had more cheese than others, not all the cheese melted!

Today it was time for dessert - solar s'mores. Although the sun disappeared behind cloud at the beginning of our one hour "cooking" session, the marshmallows were warm and the chocolate gooey and melted!  We learnt that we can use the sun's energy to cook some food but that hot chips need s'more sun to be perfect!

What's cooking?

Cardboard, cling film, newspaper, tin foil: what are we cooking up here? We have created our solar ovens. This week we are hoping the sun will shine to see how they harness the power of the sun.

What time is it?

The sun was shining ... we were thinking about Maui slowing the sun. We were reminded about the history of time, clocks ... and sundials. Can we tell the time using the sun?

We discovered that we can tell the time using a sundial ... on a sunny day ... but that the shadow moved "the wrong way" (anti-clockwise) because we live in the southern hemisphere!

Now that this time has passed, we're waiting for another sunny day to find out how challenging it is to harness the sun's energy.