Room 13's Learning Journey 2014: February 2014

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Bikes in Schools Programme

We have just started a great bike skills programme called Pedal Power. In the first session we learned about safety and the parts of a bike.

We all had to get the right size helmet and bicycle. We had to learn how to adjust the helmet perfectly.

We all had to have the correct helmet fitted

Helmets must not have any breaks...

A properly fitted helmet looks like this...

This helmet is not tight enough

Kerri told us how to get the right size bike

We all got the right size bike

We learned how to line up and follow the cones and stay on the correct course so there were no accidents

We had a great session! Thank you Kerri and Latesha. We can't wait for the next session.

Making Lolly Leis and Sherbet Bags for the Elm Park Gala

We have been really busy this week making lolly leis for our school gala. We used tulle casings to hold the sweets and one of our lovely parents used her overlocker to make the tubes.

The colourful tulle

Overlocking the tubes for strength

The sweets

Laying out the sweet pattern

Collecting the lollies...

A very tricky job...

"Is my pattern symmetrical?"

"Have we got everything?"

Adding the fiddly ties ...

A job well done!

"Phew- we did it"

Great teamwork everyone...!

We also made sherbet bags for the gala:

Here is the recipe given to us by Teryn's mother that makes 10 bags of sherbet.

Icing sugar 1 cup

Citric acid 1 tablespoon (tblsp)

Tartaric acid 1 and a half teaspoons (tsp)

Baking soda 3 quarters of a tsp

Raro flavouring 4 tsp

OR jelly crystals

The main ingredient...

First we sifted the icing sugar... then add the citric acid, tartaric acid, baking soda and Raro flavouring

Mrs Houghton has a fancy sealing machine to seal the bags filled with sherbet and a lollipop for dipping

Yum! We hope all the leis sell at the school gala this Sunday, 2 March.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Finishing our Te Tuhi etchings

We worked really hard to finish our artworks. We found some paint difficult to remove so we experimented and found that a metal scraping tool, plus dampening small areas of paint, helped us to remove the paint from the large letters that made up our large window message: YES! WE ARE AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND.

Riley quickly mastered the scrapers!

We look forward to putting up our message on our classroom windows!

Here is the final collaborative artwork. We did it with teamwork!

Teamwork: Rob the Nest

We all enjoy the collaborative game Rob the Nest. Members of 4 teams have to work together to run, hop, skip or roll to a central hoop and take one beanbag back to their Team's hoop. Once finished each member may go and "rob" the nests of other teams and take one beanbag to their hoop. It was hilarious when we added "rolling" to the fun.

We soon realised how accurate some of our expert "rollers" were! Check out our photos.

Our Art Workshop at Te Tuhi Contemporary Art Gallery: I AM NZ

Two weeks ago R13 went to Te Tuhi to do the I AM NZ workshop. We did a lot of preparation before the visit. We learned about all the reasons we love and appreciate Aotearoa/NZ; we looked at the artworks of some NZ artists who are inspired by NZ and their cultural heritage The first group of photos on this post show the work of the artists we studied for our own inspiration:

At the galley we worked with Jeremy Leatinu'u and we used the personal designs we had drawn at school to etch our own artworks. We each used an alphabet letter to create our own sentence:
Yes! We are Aotearoa New Zealand as we are proud of our country. We also felt proud that we worked together to create a unique collective artwork for our classroom window.

We etched our designs on mylar transparency sheets that had been covered with a layer of black paint. We prepared plates for the next class after our group.