Sketch Drawings and Pitch!

Paper for trees!

As a follow on from our inquiry into reducing paper use at school, from last term, we received our four trees to plant. Every skip of paper we recycle equals a certain number of plants for the school under the 'Paper for trees' scheme set up by a non profit organisation.

This week we 'bedded' them in to keep them growing until we find a good place for them in the school grounds. Great work, team!

Research Write up!

The Pens and Quills writing groups will be using this interactive to help guide your writing about your passion project research. Great design starts with great research!

What is Empathy?

Watch this video and brainstorm ways we can listen with integrity. How can having empathy helps us?

The Design Process - Quirky

Sometimes the design process can be tricky and you may need to redraw your design. Here's a video that show how many drawings or concepts a designer can go through before they get to their successful idea.

Global Cardboard Challange

What do you think about this? Should we take part (a little late)?

Imagination.is website

Production Pics

We have a few side of stage production pics in our class dropbox folder you can see. You can even download them if you want to keep a copy for your self. Click on the pic below to get a closer look!

Paper Surveys - Parents - Competition

We are hoping to gather some data about how we use paper. We have created some surveys for parents, students and teachers at our school. This should help us create some solutions to our 'paper problem' - 'How can we be more sustainable with paper?'

Can you fill in our parent surveys? Every entry to our surveys goes into the draw for a king size bar of chocolate! - Yum!

Parents Survey - Recycling

Parent Survey - 2

School Newsletter Survey

How to make google forms

A google form is an online survey. We're going to make a survey to collect data on our paper investigation.

Watch this 'how to' video to learn how...

What can WE do about it?

Here's a great animated video that gives us some ideas about what we can do to make a difference for our planet. Watch and fill out the think board - while gathering some of those ideas!



Today we thought of some things we can do at home and mimed them to the class - we had to guess what they were and then think critically about the pros and cons of each action. Can you guess the environmental actions from these photos?

Save the Kiwi!

WALT: recall and retell facts. Think critically and make inferences.

Environmental Issue - 2!

Let's watch this and practise our 'remember facts and information' and 'think critically' WALTs for oral language! - Mrs Kerr will help you complete the think boards in your groups...



What do you think about this issue? What can YOU do about it?

A Great News Show

Watch this example of some kids doing a news show and make a criteria for tomorrow's screening!

Inspiration for Jibboo

Everyone was pretty excited about Jibboo this Friday and we had a great discussion about what we can and can't do for our businesses. I thought this video of a boy called Cain might inspire a few people to create some amazing ideas for their business.

 Remember - these are the basic rules.

 1. No sugar (we have a tax but sugar is ruled out due to the next rule...

 2. No products using things bought with NZ dollars - recycled or free materials (not even bought by your mum). 

 3. Use your imagination and creativity - you products or service will do best if adapted over time, based on what your customers want. 

 Here's the pretty cool story about a boy your age (mostly)

Caine's Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.

Global Warming!

Today we dug deeper into the issue of global warming. We're getting better at remembering facts and information and we used this video to help us practise.


In groups of 3 or 4 we stopped at intervals and completed these thinking maps. Thomas and Aidan W did a great job at recalling the information and recording it on their map.

Our big idea this for this term's inquiry is, 'We can make a difference to the world around us!' I can see from the comment in the 'How do I feel about this?' section that we have some work to do to convince someone that they CAN influence or make change, no matter how small. I like your honesty, boys.

How do you feel about global warming?

For a challenge - did you know that there are some people who don't believe that global warming is actually happening? You could ask you parents why...

Environmental News

Today we created a criteria for what makes a great news show. This is called 'feed up!' Here are our ideas.

Remember to work on your next steps from your speech in week 2 - that's called 'feed forward!'

Are you ready to Geocache?

Here is what we will use to get us started on our big class Geocache hunt today. We are going to be putting our mapping skills to the test - BIG TIME!

The Lorax! - Original Book

News Show Example

Next Wednesday you'll be presenting your news show about the environmental issue your team is investigating. Here's an example from last year to give you an idea of what you could do.

What could you do to improve it?

Teacher's College Skype

Today we had a skype session with some trainee teachers from our local teacher's college. They spent 30 minutes asking us about how we use elearning strategies and technology in class to help us learn!

There were some fantastic questions and I was so proud and impressed with their answers. Here are some of the questions they asked;

 - what kinds of technology do we have?
 - how do we think it helps us learn?
 - do we have any ipad apps we could recommend?
 - are there any negatives to having the technology in class?

It was an excellent opportunity to practise our oral language learning goal for the week of 'Using our Social Courtesies!' I was proud of you all for the way you spoke in turns and the polite, detailed answers you gave - here's a screen shot of the comment their lecturer sent on skype afterwards!