Easter Hunt

To celebrate Easter, Room 18 had an Easter hunt.  First, we handed out letters, one to each student.  Then we had to collaborate to make a message with all the letters,

DIG IN THE JUNIOR SANDPIT

Charlize found the treasure.

She opened the treasure box back in the classroom and gave everyone a little Easter chick.

Sunflower Art

We looked closely at sunflowers from Mrs Bear's garden,  the sunflower heads on the Science table and pictures of sunflowers on the internet.  Then we cut out petals from newspaper and glues them around seed circles we had drawn on paper.  When the glue was dry, we blended yellow and orange paint, and painted the petals starting at the centre and brushing to the end of each petal.  We had to paint the petals several times to cover the newsprint.

After that, we crunched up little squares of tissue paper and glued them onto the centre of the flowers to resemble the sunflower seeds.  The glue was very thick here and, in some cases, took three days to dry!  We painted these seed circles with brown painted, dabbing the paint brush up and down to make sure that all the pink tissue was covered with brown.

To finish, we blended blue and purple paint to colour the background.  We pulled up the petals where we could to paint underneath, and in other places tried very carefully to keep blue splodges off our yellow petals!

Here are a couple of finished sunflowers.  You can see others on the Visual Art page.

Eradicating moth plant

Two high school students from Howick College came to Cockle Bay to talk to Room 18 and Room 5 about moth plant.  Moth plant is an introduced plant, meaning that it is not a native to New Zealand.  It is a vine that grows wherever it can, and entangles itself around the branches of trees and kills other native plants as they compete for the sun.

Ryan and Marco showed us how moth plants wraps its tendrils around trunks and branches by using themselves as tree models.  They also showed us how to eradicate moth plant by pulling young plants out by the roots or by cutting vines and pulling them out of branches.  They also showed us the safe way to use secateurs to cut and vines, and protect ourselves with old clothes and garden gloves.

Solar Similes

We went outside onto the field, and looked up at the sun using solar safety glasses to keep our eyes safe.  It was interesting to see how different the sun looked using these glasses.

Afterwards, we brainstormed some ideas and then wrote lots of similes about the sun.

Here are some of our creative ideas:

"The sun is like a smiling emoiji," by Hannah.
"The sun is like an orange," by Summer.
"The sun is like an egg yolk", by Rylee.
"The sun is as bright as a meteor ball," by Jeremy.
"The sun is as beautiful as a lantern glowing in the sky," by Kavesha.
"The sun is as golden as the egg from Jack and the Beanstalk," by Chelsea.
"The sun is as bright as a light bulb," by Andrew.
"The sun is as round as a tyre," by Taylor.
"The sun is as round as a clock," by Lincoln.
"The sun was glowing very bright like a fire," by Juwon.
"The sun is as round as the emojis on the mood wall," by Kate.
"The sun is as shimmery as a gem," by Alyssa.

Support for Christchurch

Everyone in Room 18 cut out and coloured in a person to show their support for people in Christchurch, and to let them know that we are thinking of them.  When all the paper people were finished we stuck them together in a long line to show our solidarity.  

Other classes made a people paper chain too, and Mrs Stansfield posted them in one big parcel, which we hope will cheer everyone up.

Bubble Buddies

Room 18 went to Room 29 to visit their buddies again for another Science session.  This time we investigated how much liquid soap we needed to add to water to make the best bubble mixture, to make the longer lasting bubbles.

Maths Money

We used Maths money to practise our understanding of place value; using $1 notes and $10 notes to make all sorts of numbers up to 99.

Here are some of the two digit numbers to broke down into $10 and $1 notes.  You can see more on the Maths page.

18 was one $10 notes and eight $1 notes.

22 was two $10 notes and two $1 notes.

Air Hockey

Room 18 had a chance to play air hockey.  First we learnt the basics: how to manage the hockey stick safely and hit the ball effectively. 

Then we were organised into teams and played mini hockey matches inside air walls.

Butterfly Art

After one of our butterfly hatched, we created our own butterfly art.  We looked at pictures of butterflies and copied them carefully using black wax crayon.  After we had finished the black outline, we use orange dye to colour the wings.

Here are some of our butterflies; you can see them all on the Visual Art page.

Monarch Butterfly

We looked after several swan plants in Room 18, and watched the Monarch caterpillars hatch and eat their way through the swan plant foliage.  We had four chrysalis hanging on different branches.  We came to school one morning and found a Monarch butterfly had emerged in the night and was sitting, rather wistfully, next to the window looking out.

Alyssa very carefully started to carry it outside, but it had other ideas . . . and fluttered to the relative safety of Luke's school shorts!  He walked very slowly and gently outside where we placed it on a shrub by the Junior Green.  When we checked at morning tea, the butterfly had flown away.

Bug Hunt

Everyone in Room 18 went on a bug hunt to see what we could find on the oak walk up in the Seniors, behind Room 10 and the swimming pool.  We found ants, beetles, spiders and cockroaches, but no cicada skins to add to our total cicada total count. 

Science Space

People brought the cicada shells that they collected at home or in nearby parks, and added them to our Cicada Maths charts.

Our final count for the summer was 740!

We found that black sand from Bethells Beach had enough iron in it to be attracted to magents.

Our seedlings have sprouted and continue to grow.

We were able to extract sunflower seeds from the sunflower seed head.

We planted lima beans on black paper wedged inside the glass.  It will be interesting to see their roots grow as they start to shoot.  We filled the middle space is wet, crunched up paper towels to keep the seeds moist.