Guy Fawkes Fireworks Art

When Mrs Wallace was visiting our classroom we were lucky enough to create some beautiful fireworks art.  After we'd finished our artwork, we added them to our cardboard boxes that we'd painted black and stacked them up so that they looked like a rocket ship in our classroom.

Here are our instructions:
1.  Use crayon to colour in a whole piece of paper with different colours.
2.  Paint the coloured in paper with black paint.
3.  Use the back of the paintbrush to scratch patterns into the black paint so that the colours show through.
4.  Add some glitter to the paper too.

We really enjoyed adding the glitter, scratching the patterns into the paint, painting the paper and colouring the paper in.

We found it hard to wait for it to dry to scratch our patterns into our paper.

We found it easy to paint the black paint on.

Next time we would add people to our patterns.

There are lots of exciting events that happen at this time of the year.  Some of our favourite things are our Christmas concert, Christmas and Jesus' birthday!
What are yours?

Turanganui Kapa Haka Festival

In Week 6, we went to the Turanganui Kapa Haka festival! 

The boys wore their black shorts and no top and the girls wore their special kapa haka dresses or black t-shirts and shorts.

The boys did the haka.  The haka they performed was Ka mate! 

Everyone sung a waiata - which is a song.  We sung hallelujah which is spelled Hareruia in te reo Maori.

Some of us got nervous performing in front of so many people!  We saw our parents there.

We had ta moko on too. The girls had ta moko on their chins and their lips and the boys just had it on their cheeks. The lipstick was put on with eyeliner and the ta moko on our chins or cheeks was put on with special ink.  The ink was put on using a special stamp by rolling the print onto glass, pressed it down and then pressed it on our faces.

The girls had red feathers in their hair and our hair in a high ponytail.  Some of us had our taonga on too, which are special necklaces made out of greenstone which is called pounamu. 

Labelled Bee Diagram

We enjoyed our bee learning so much that we created lots of artwork about them.  We also have blogged about our bee artwork already and shared lots of information with you.  One thing we thought we could do next was to create some diagrams showing all the different parts of the bee bodies that we know.  Here is our diagram!

Maui and the Sun Artwork

In Room 6 we were reading a few special books about Maui and the sun.

In this story, Maui was trying to slow the sun down as there wasn't enough time in the day to get all his chores done.  The sun was going too fast!  Maui made ropes out of flax and said a special karakia so they would be strong and used them to catch the sun.  Maui told the sun it needed to go slower and the sun said ,"Okay".

Some of our favourite parts of creating our artwork were:

• Using the cotton buds to dye our paper
• Trying our hardest to draw our pictures
• Designing our own drawings
• Creating our drawings

Some of the most challenging parts of creating our suns were:

• Drawing the sun with the special lines for its face
• Creating the designs with the rays so that it looked similar to the drawings in the book
• Trying to stay inside the lines with the dye
• Dyeing them so that there was no peekaboo white (no white spots showing)
• Waiting for one colour to dry before we did the next one.  (If we didn't wait for it to dry it dripped into the other colours).
• Creating the mouth of the sun because it was a special shape
• Being patient and waiting to be able to add each colour one by one.  We really wanted to finish!

Some of the things we think we could do to make our artwork even better are:

• create some rainbow-coloured artwork with the same technique
• try to get the designs just like the Māori designs in the book
• put some more designs and detail in what we did
• instead of colouring it in we could put some other things on to make it more interesting
• make some rainbows with some pink and add some bees to it too!

Check out our artwork in the slides below:

   

Our Stream Work

Does your school have a local stream?

In Room 6 we have been learning about how to take care of our stream.  We were learning about the rubbish near our stream and how this can get out into our ocean.

We started learning about this because we wanted to do something to help.
Some of the things we have learned are:
It is important to NOT put rubbish in or near our rivers.
Maori people used to use the stream for lots of things like bathing and fishing for eels and getting some stones for their hangi.  They also used the river as a road, for padding place to place in their waka.

Maori also used a big different rock in our river as a meeting place.  Captain Cook and the Maori Chief used to meet there.  When the settlers came to Tairāwhiti, they didn't know this rock was special and they blew it up so that they could make the port bigger for their big ships.

We can help our environment by keeping the rubbish out of our streams.

We created these paintings because we wanted to show how special our river is to all the birds and animals.
 Some of the things we enjoyed when we were creating our paintings were painting the trees and sun in the background because they are so special to us . The golden paint was really sticky, like slime.  We also liked cutting out the birds and animals and sticking them on.
Some of the things that were challenging were keeping the paint inside the lines of the paper and also, painting the trees so that they looked just like the trees we really like.
Next we would like to make our trees look more sophisticated.

Creating Quality Blog Posts

In Room 6 we have been learning about creating blog posts to share our learning.
We use a tool online called Blogger.

We know when we create blog posts we need to make them the best we can be AND this is all new learning to us, so sometimes we will need to use tools to help us to do this.  One thing we can use is called a 'rubric'.  This is a tool that helps us to be able to check we have got all the right information.

Today, we learned how to add our rubric by embedding the Google Slide here in our blog post.
We had to use the  HTML tab in Blogger to add the embed code for the Google Slide.  We will use this rubric to help with our blogging.

You Won't Bee-Lieve the Bees!

In Room 6 at St Mary's School we have been learning all about bees.  They are such interesting creatures!  We got so curious about them and learned so much.

Did you know that bees are really important to our food?  Lots of the food we eat, like fruits and vegetables, are pollinated by bees.  They wouldn't be able to grow without them. 

Many of the animals in our world would disappear without bees too, because they pollinate the foods that the animals eat too.

Some of our favourite things about bees are:

A large group of bees is called a colony.

Bees spew honey into other bees mouths - that’s how they make honey. Other bees spew it into honeycombs and that's how we get honey.  Bees leave some of their honey and make it into this hard stuff that they eat.  Honeybees make lots of honey but normal bees and bumble bees don’t.  Each bee makes only  a little amount of honey - in their lifetime they make about one teaspoon of honey.  Honey never goes off.

Girl bees are worker bees.
Boy bees are called drones.

Bees have six legs.  They are insects. 
Bees have five eyes.  Bees have three body parts - the head, the abdomen, and the thorax.

If a queen bee dies the other bees will put royal jelly into cells to make a new queen.  The queen.  They lay about 2000 eggs a day.  Bees are very tidy - if one dies, one of them has a job to put it outside of the hive.

When they talk they dance - that’s how they tell other bees how to get to a good flower
When they talk they shake their bodies. 
Bees can get viruses that make their wings go bent when they hatch.

We want to save the bees because  they are important to our survival and the survival of many animals.