Room 10 RBS

One day Ms Fothergill told us that we weren’t going to write our weekend recounts in the usual way. Instead of drafting a story in our books we were going to draft pictures and then a script.

After we drafted the pictures we chose which comic layout we wanted to use and published our pictures. Then Ms Fothergill used her cell phone to record our scripts. Then she put them together in a voicethread.

Ms Fothergill likes to geocache as a hobby and owns a special cache called a stargate. This means she gets lots of parcels sent to her from overseas. Today she brought one into school and we got to look at all the travel bugs. These are coins or small toys that travel around the world visiting caches.

Here we are with the travel bugs.

Yesterday we had a visit from Greg the Park Ranger. We learned lots of interesting facts including:

* Sometimes forest fires are good
* Flamingos can be white or pink or red
* Flamingos eat pink shrimp which turns them pink
* This is a handy rhyme to remember: “Red and yellow, deadly fellow; red and black, friend of Jack”
* The highest point of the Everglades is only 3ft high! – It’s also very flat.
* People used to eat flamingos so there aren’t many left
* The Everglades is a National Park (1.5 million acres)
* The animals aren’t in cages or behind fences
* It’s the only place in the world where crocodiles and alligators share the same habitat
* Atlantic dolphins visit the Everglades during winter
* We think it should be called ‘Animal Land’ because of all the animals there
* If you walk through the Everglades at night with red cellophane over your torch you see lots of crocodile eyes watching you
* No one has ever been eaten by crocodiles there
* Greg regularly sees around 100 alligators on his walk to work in the mornings
* They have snakes there
* There are over 100 different types of birds
* Baby crocs make a hmm type of noise to call their mother
* Baby crocs are sometimes carried around in their mother’s mouth
* The Blue Heron is as tall as Eli and has a wing span of 6ft
* Greg has never seen a panther (even though they are there in the Everglades)
* Instead of “Ducks crossing” signs like we see in New Zealand, he sees “Panthers crossing” signs

Link to some sites about the Everglades that we have looked at.

We had a special visitor today – Greg, a Park Ranger at Florida Everglades National Park in the USA. Greg is Eli’s uncle.

We’re all wearing our Junior Park Ranger badges in this photo.

Thanks Greg for taking time out of your holiday to talk to us. It was awesome. We all learned something new (even Ms Fothergill).

We have a visit on Tuesday from Greg Litton, uncle of one of our students and a Florida Everglades Park Ranger.

This is a link to some everglade links for anyone wanting to check out from home.

This week for maths we are finishing off our 2D/3D unit by making lots of 3D shapes. Here are some pictures of us starting work on turning our nets into beautiful creative 3D shapes.

Geometric shapes on PhotoPeach

Room 10 and Room 12 went on a trip to Pataka today. We had lots of fun learning about the colour red and doing stencil art. (More to come about that.)

After both classes had gone through the gallery and classroom programmes we went in the bus to Aotea Lagoon where we had lunch and a play before going back to school.

Aotea Lagoon – Lunch & Play on PhotoPeach

Voicethread is a way of allowing people to show off some artwork or writing and let other people comment on it. We are going to be using voicethread to showcase some of our work. I’ve started with our class Autumn Leaves Cinquain project.

This is our first Friday roundup. We have started to skype with another room in the school and today we were having problems so we videoed our report in case we couldn’t talk to them. Ms F added some captions.

Ms F changed the room around last night – we got a huge surprise this morning. We did some brainstorming about the changes.

Today we had a surprise visit from Mr Pansters from Room 15. He used to teach some of us last year. He told us a really funny story.

After he had gone we dyed our cinquain leaves.

We also did leaf rubbings. Ms Fothergill is going to assemble the dyed leaves, leaf rubbings and real leaves together into one big display. We hope our parents will be proud of our work.