Back in Room 10!

Now that the senior block at Ruapotaka has been reopened, we are excited to have returned to Room 10 to find our usual desks and things.  Alex is pleased to be reunited with her glasses which have been in her desk since 6th September!  It is fantastic to see how much our garden has grown while we were away too!

A host of golden daffodils

Measuring, marking, cutting ... pinwheel daffodils for Daffodil Day!

How many cups of water?

Facing challenge and challenging faces

After making different 3D shapes with sticks, straws and blutak, we looked at 3D shapes from a different perspective. We cut out the nets of hexagonal and triangular prisms and then had to figure out how to glue the net to create the shape. A few people challenged themselves to make an icosahedron from a net: twenty triangular faces took a lot of effort to glue into shape!

He aha te tāima?

Kuini: He aha te taima?
Mary: Kua tekau karaka te tāima.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori is a great time to practise what we already know and learn some new words and phrases in te reo. We had fun practising our numbers up to 100 and learning to ask and tell the time with a buddy. Ka pai, Rūma Tekau!

Ka-ching!!

Start saving now ... ka-ching!! That was the message from Tessa when she visited Room 10 to teach us how to be smarter with money. She did this as part of the ASB bank's GetWise financial literacy programme. We remembered some ways we might earn money when we are a little bit older. We remembered about saving vs. spending. We learnt that we can save a little bit more by choosing to save our money with a bank. This is because the banks pay interest which adds extra money to the money already in our account. Ka-ching!!

Maths time! - by Henry

When I came back from being sick we had to do maths which was amazing! We made 3D cubes. We had to use stick and straws which I was so excited to do. I was working with Saluselo and Shakaia. Then I made another 3D shape. That's what I learnt about for maths.

FLiP!

FLiP is a financial literacy programme developed by PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) for Year 5 and 6 students. Nikki and Sigred, our coaches from PwC, visited Room 10 for four sessions to share their knowledge about being smarter with money. We learnt about saving and spending, being a responsible borrower, protecting our identity and different types of insurance. After learning lots of new words and learning through fun activities, we were each presented with achievement certificates at our final session yesterday.

Frosted curls and a golden star

Despite today being the shortest day of 2016, we finally replanted our Room 10 garden! We read the information labels, planned our plot and measured the distance between each plant. Lots of digging, lots of earth and lots of smiles as we watched our garden take shape. We will water and watch to see how our native grasses and other plants grow. The coprosma, Golden Star, reminds us of Matariki.

What is the area of our garden?

We are learning about area. We are learning to measure the area of a rectangle. We started by working with a buddy to find out how many squares of paper it took to cover our paper "garden".  We all agreed that it took 18 squares.

Measuring my hand span - by Zion

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.

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.

Talking about Maths x 4

Mrs Pine, the Maths lady, visited Room 10 today to listen to us talking and working together to solve maths problems.

Who has the longest perimeter?

To check what we know about measuring length, we each measured our perimeter.  We agreed that we would use centimetres as our unit of measurement. Most of us predicted that Bella would have the longest perimeter in Room 10 as she is quite tall.

We worked with two buddies so we could help each other.  First of all, while one of us made the biggest shape we could, our buddies drew the shape.  Next it was time to measure the four sides of the shape accurately.  We worked out the perimeter by adding the length of the four sides together.

After finding the longest perimeter in each group, we compared measurements to decide the longest perimeter in Room 10.  Yes, our prediction was correct: it was Bella.  She made a shape with a perimeter of 584 cm.

"We're making clay pizza" by Leilani

My class mates and I were making fraction pizza out of clay. It was fun. We were talking about what toppings we were going to put on and who we were going to share the pizza with. When we made our pizza, we had to make sure that me and my buddy had the same amount of topping when we cut the pizzas into quarters, thirds and halves.  That's what we're up to with our maths.

Awesome Origami

While making origami twirling birds, there were lots of things we needed to think about.  First of all we had to create a square out of our rectangular paper. Next we had to carefully read the instructions so that we were able to fold our paper in the correct sequence. Voila!  Soon there were birds twirling all around Room 10.

10, 9, 8 ...

Everyone in Room 10 thought carefully as they began to create a profile for their personal blog last week.  They had to remember what information they would like to share and what they would like to keep private.  Decisions also had to be made about an image to be inserted in the profile: a photographed face, a self-portrait or another piece of artwork?

Soon our individual blogs will be ready to launch! 10, 9, 8 ...

Talking about Maths

As well as helping each other to be Cybersmart in Room 10, we are learning to co-operate when we are solving maths problems.  We try to listen carefully to each other when we are working with a buddy or in a group so we can understand there are different ways to solve a problem.

Room Ten's Favourite Fruit

We are learning about using graphs to display data in Maths.  We each chose the fruit we like to eat the most at school.  To make it easy to see which fruit is the most popular, we each created a pictograph in Google Drawings from our class tally chart.  Here are some examples of our work: