Science Fair

Ashley and Jye Yin tell us all about the science fair that has been happening at Hillcrest Normal School this week...

 

All of the senior classes took part in a science fair this week. Room 22 and 11 did light, Room 23 and 9 did simple machines, Room 10 did fire and Room 8 did magnets. We all had set up a table with an experiment.

 

One of Room 8's experiments was showing people how to make a magnet. What you do is you get a pin and a magnet then you stroke the magnet along the pin but only stroke it one way. You need to stoke it 25-50 times. What happens is the magnet pulls all of the atoms in the paperclip to face the same way, and that is what creates the magnet. In a magnet all of the atoms are facing the same way but in a pin they are all facing in different directions. We had some special visitors at the science fair, Mrs Frizzle(a character from the magic school bus) and Mrs  Ryan (an old science teacher at our school).  They came to open the science fair. We all had lots of fun and learnt heaps.

 

Cross Country Poetry

Room 8 have been writing free verse about our cross country run a couple of weeks ago. Here are a few for you to enjoy.

More lovely pukekos

It was another busy afternoon creating our lovely pukeko pictures for our calendars. Here are six more of our creations for you to enjoy!

 Brandon's Pukeko

 Zoe's Pukeko

 Ronak's Pukeko

Amy's Pukeko 

 Joel's Pukeko

Sithika's Pukeko

Stunning Pukekos

We have been working hard on our calendars and our first ones are finished. We have used a mixture of pastels, paint and collage to create our masterpieces. We are very pleased with the way they have turned out, let us know what you think.

 Ashley's Pukeko

 Ella's Pukeko

 Gwen's Pukeko

 Izzy's Pukeko

 Mosese's Pukeko

Zach's Pukeko

Surgery or Not?

We hope you are enjoying our series of persuasive writing about the kiwi, do let us know what you think about the subject.Today Aspen tells us why she thinks it was worthwhile operating on K2 the kiwi.

Surgery or Not?

K2 is a kiwi who had an accident when he  hatched. His leg had twisted around the wrong way. The people who were looking after him decided to fix him with surgery. These are some reasons why it was worth saving K2 the kiwi.

Kiwi are endangered.They are very rare, there are only 1600 little spotted kiwi left!

80 years ago there were 5,000,000 kiwi in New Zealand but in 2008 there were 72,600. In the wild only 5% of kiwi chicks will live to adulthood when chicks in captivity have a 65% chance of surviving.

Kiwi are only found in New Zealand, they don’t live anywhere else because they love the food here. The great spotted

Kiwi only live on Stewart island so spend some money to help our kiwi!

Finally kiwi are a symbol to New Zealand  and we are called kiwis .When people come to New Zealand they go to kiwi houses so we can’t lose our native bird if were called kiwis and if they go extinct we can’t be called kiwis anymore!

That’s why I think it is worth saving K2. Kiwi are very special to New Zealand and are close to extinction so donate now, please save our kiwi. 

A kiwi being looked after by an Operation Nest Egg helper.

Kiwi Crisis

It's Izzy's turn to share her writing about the kiwi today, let us know what you think about her arguments. 

Kiwi Crisis

In New Zealand we are losing more and more kiwi each year, if we don’t do something now we are going to lose our national symbol. But is it worth saving them? Wouldn’t you save yourself if you were suffering what kiwis are?

Kiwis are an endangered species. Only 25,000 brown kiwis remain in NZ. 80 years ago about 5 million kiwi and in 2008 there were only 72,600, this number is estimated to decline to 63,500 by 2018 because of us. We need to do spend some money on something the whole of newzealand cares about.

Kiwis are only found in New Zealand of our most threatened kiwi the rowi and the haast tokoeka, only 350 of these kiwis remain to survive. They are found in the two separate regions of the west coast of the south island. So why can’t we save the kiwi there’s no excuse for us not to. At the moment these areas  are not safe and we need to do something about it.

Kiwis are a symbol to New Zealand and we don’t want our name to be taken away for something we did. Tourist come to NZ to look at the kiwi because of cause they don’t have them in their country. Tourists go to gift shops with kiwi items and we get money from those gift shops. But if kiwi go extinct, NO MORE MONEY, NO MORE TOURISTS!!! Tourists are a big part of New Zealands economy.

So do help save the kiwi as they are close to extinction, are only found in NZ , and are our national symbol. DONATE NOW!!

Saving the Kiwi

Today Ella is going to share her piece of writing on why we should work hard to save the kiwi, as you can see it's an issue Room 8 feel strongly about.

Saving the Kiwi

K2 is a brown kiwi who had an accident after he was born which made his leg twist round the opposite way round, which is why I believe we should help all Kiwis.

Kiwis are endangered, the most endangered species of kiwi is the Haast Tokoeka and the Rowi with a small amount of about 350 remaining. The brown kiwi has the most with approximately 25, 0000. So if we don’t protect our precious kiwi they will all be as dead as a Dodo.

As I said before, kiwis are endangered! If we don’t help the kiwi they will be extinct, which is terrible because they only live in New Zealand.  If they die there will be no more kiwi left in the world. If they all get wiped out we will have no symbol. The Australians get the Kangaroos, why can’t we have something special that lives in our country.

Our national emblem is the kiwi because no other country has any. Your probably thinking, so what? Why do you need a national emblem?  Well the truth is, we don’t, but they're endangered and native. No one looked after them so we did, and since then we are called kiwis.

Kiwi are endangered their native and their New Zealand’s national emblem. We need to take care of them. Imagine being a kiwi and all your friends and family are dying you wouldn’t be happy at all would you?

Considering the kiwi

Today Brandon shares his piece of persuasive writing about saving the kiwi, let us know if you agree with him.

Save the kiwi.

Is it worth it? Imagine if you and your species were in trouble and no one wanted to help you how would you feel? It’s extraordinary how fast the kiwis are dying. Do you know that only 5% of the kiwis make it to adult hood.

  

Kiwis are going extinct and are you helping to save them? Do you know that 80 years ago there was around 5 million kiwi now there’s only 72 600 so that’s a 4 927 400 population drop. So need to spend some money or they will go extinct.

  

Do you know that the kiwi are only found in New Zealand and the and the only nature they can live in is New Zealand’s so they need your help. The kiwi can’t fly which makes them vulnerable to animals like rats and stocks. So we need to help them because it’s a race against time. 

  

As you might know the kiwi are famous outside and inside New Zealand they mean lots to all New Zealanders we sell millions of gifts that have kiwi on them. They are our national symbol. We must stop taking them for granted. They are what brings New Zealand together so please do help.

The North Island Brown Kiwi

Should we save the Kiwi?

We have been looking at persuasive writing in Room 8, writing which tried to convince the reader to agree with our point of view. To start we learnt about a kiwi called K2 who had to have an operation to fix his twisted leg, we then discussed whether it was worth spending the money on him and whether it is worth trying to save the kiwi altogether. Here is Zach's piece on whether it is worth trying to save the kiwi...do you agree with him?

Kiwis

If there were only roughly 42,600 of us humans left, you had a broken leg and you were suffering, you would pay $Millions to fix it, right? I think kiwis should be saved from extinction because they are endangered. They are also endemic to New Zealand.

Kiwis are flightless birds. They used to be able to fly but they lost their wings. There was no danger 20 million years ago so they lost their wings and now they regret it. Now there is stoats and rats and weasels and plenty more nasty little critters out there ready to make a meal out of the poor little flightless kiwi. If we don’t do something the population will decline tragically and they will fall into the black hole of extinction

Kiwis should be saved from extinction because, if we don’t, the customers at New Zealand gift shops at museums and stores will dramatically decline. Do you know why? Because of you! You decided to let the beautiful, flightless kiwi die! You made the little kiwi toys disappear because there are no more kiwis to study on!

In conclusion, I think kiwis should be saved from extinction because they are nearly extinct.     

K2 the Kiwi after his operation

More Marvelous Pukekos

Some more of Room 8 finished their pukeko sketches today and here they are for your enjoyment. I think you'll agree they look quite stunning.

 Sithika's Pukeko

 Finn's Pukeko

Marija's pukeko

Pukeko Pictures

We are starting to work on our calendars for this year. Mrs Davies decided we were going to use Pukekos as our topic and so we have been busy sketching from photographs. We've been making sure we get all the detail into our sketch and then adding tone to show the light and dark parts of the picture. Here are the first few sketches that are finished, let us know what you think. 

 Zach's pukeko

 Daniel's pukeko

 Izzy's pukeko

 Ashley's pukeko

 Aspen's pukeko

 Joel's pukeko

 Viola's pukeko

 Jye Yin's pukeko

Lets go fly a kite

We have been making kites over the last couple of weeks and finding out about how they fly. Today we got to take the kites out onto our school field to test them out and have some fun. It was a great way to celebrate the end of term and lots of fun was had by all...

Marija's animation

Continuing in our series of procedural writing about our animations, today Marija is going to share her piece...

Animations

Animations are like mini movies with mini people only you need a normal camera to take little pictures . Then ,when you put them all together....BAM! You have an animation! We made animations about camp. 

So first we decided what camp activity we were going to do, then we made a background and painted it lots of colours! After that, we started to make our mini people! 

We drew our mini people and put them in our AWESOME ANIMATIONS! Each of us took 10 to 20 pictures before we started to move our mini people. 

When we finally finished, we uploaded the animations onto the computer, saved them as movies, and we all had fun watching them when our parents came! 

Ella's animation writing

Today Ella is going to share her piece of writing about how we made our animations...

How to make animation

Animation is lots of individual photos joint together in chronological order to make movement. The animation I’m going to talk about is 2D, we made ours in room 8 about our school camp

Firstly you need to plan what your going to do on a A3 piece of paper then you neatly draw  your background on a A1 sized piece of paper. After that you paint your background with a fat brush first then a skinny brush to do the detail. Soon after the paint has dried put in extra details with pastel.

Next you need to make a person out of paper (that person being you). To make that paper person you need to draw all the different joints including your body and head. Before cutting the bits out you will need to draw your face and clothes. Once you’ve finished that you need to inky/sharpie your person and colour him/her in. Then cut out the pieces and use bluetac to stick him/her together. Why do you need to use bluetac? Because if you use glue or tape your person won’t able to move!

Later, if you need props draw them, inky them and then lastly colour them!

Afterwards, set up a special place for your background so you can only see the background and nothing else. Set up your people and props in the right spot ready to film. To start you need to take 10-20 pictures without moving your person because you don’t want to go straight into the action that would ruin it. Start to move your people in small movements and take a photo after every movement.

When you’ve taken about 100-200 photos, you upload your pictures onto a computer and put them together on a movie editing program. If there are any unwanted pictures that you’ve taken now’s the chance to remove them. After that you will need to add in credits and titles, and if you want any you can put in music and sound effects. Last but not least save it as a movie in a folder so it won’t get lost.

I felt good about my movie because it turned out really well. Making it gave me an opportunity to film and makes an animation which made me feel great. If I we’re you and you hadn’t done this I’d probably have a go!

Writing about animation

We have been learning about procedural writing in Room 8 and using our learning to write about creating our animations. We looked at other examples, analysed what we needed to put into our writing and then created our own piece of procedural writing to describe our animation process. We will be sharing some of these pieces. To start us off Viola shares her piece of writing...

Artistic animation

What is animation? Its lots of pictures, a movie, heaps of hard work and definitely lots of fun! This is how a 2D animation is made.

This animation is about our camp experiences. Firstly we planned all the things we wanted. Then we drew our back ground on an A1 piece of paper. After drawing we painted and pasteled the background for detail.

Meanwhile, we made our paper people and coloured them. We stuck our people together with blue–tack so we could move them, twist them and turn them into different positions. Then we made any other props we might need.

After all that preparation, we set up our background, people and camera ready to film. This is how you do it: first you take 10- 20 pictures without moving your people. This creates a pause at the start of your movie. Then you move your person a tiny amount and take one picture between each movement. We carried this on until we had about 100-200 pictures.

Lastly we uploaded our pictures onto a movie editing program. This made the pictures flow together like a real movie. We removed any unwanted pictures and added in all the titles, credits, music and sound effects. Finally we saved it as our very own movie! 

I felt like a star as everyone watched my little movie at the world premier and knew I had to do it again. I hope you will enjoy making your own movie as well.

Haiku Poems

On Friday Room 8 learnt about Haiku poetry and has a go at writing some about different subjects. They were keen to share their creations with you and they would love to hear your thoughts.

Cats (Ella)

Mouth open slightly

Searching for delicious prey

Pounce! The prey’s caught

Spring is here (Gwen)

A soft breeze flows around

New born roses rise upward

Knowing spring is here

Coldness (Lilly)

Coldness drifting through

Coldness coming back again

Warmness come back please

Spring (Viola)

Spring flowers growing

Trees reach to the horizon

Blossoms fill the earth...

Sun (Dion)

Shining above now

Following me everywhere

Giant yellow sun

Moon (Anton)

Huge luminous ball

That’s glued on a starry quit

The ball is the moon

 Leaves (Aspen)

Colours are twirling

Calling to me as they dance

Very crispy and light

Leaves (Billy)

Flowing in the wind

Brown, red, and bushy evergreens,

Crisp, dry leaves everywhere

War (Izzy Q)

Flowers squashed by soldiers

Once grassy fields now concrete battle zones

Depressing feelings strike my body

Snow (James)

Snow signalling me

Calling for the chill slowly

Melting itself sad

Amazing Animations

Our animations about camp are finished and we held our world premier in class this afternoon. Now it is your turn to get to watch them, we hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed making them and as always we would love to hear your comments.

Raft Building

The Mudslide

The Muddy Challenge

Kayaking

The Hydroslide

The Flying Fox

The Burma Trail

The Flying Fox

Muddy verse

We have been writing free verse about our experience on the mudslide at camp. Check out some of our poems below and please don't be afraid to leave us a comment.

Claymation

Room 8 have a had go at claymation after our success with the pipe cleaner creations. We each created a little creature out of plastercine (complete with googly eyes!) Then in groups of six we worked to make them come to life. As with the pipe cleaner creations we had to take lots of photos as we needed at least ten to make a second of film. Mrs Davies then put the movies together and added some music.

We are now working on our camp animations, these will take a little while but we will share when they are done so keep checking back. In the meantime we hope you enjoy the claymation and as always we'd love to hear your comments.

Strange creatures discovered in Room 8

Some rather interesting little creatures have been appearing in Room 8...
I wonder what they are up to?

Animating at home

Dion and James have been trying out their animation skills at home. Dion decided to create an action movie about a fire using his lego and James thought he would bring his camera and a battery charger to life. They both did this without any help and I think you'll agree the results are pretty impressive.

Pipe Cleaner Animation

Room 8 explain how they made their pipe cleaner animation.

On Tuesday we made some amazing animations with pipe cleaners. First we needed to craft our fantastic creatures. We twisted and turned the pipe cleaners to make their bodies. We then got into groups and planned what our creations would do. We set them up in the starting pose and then using a camera on a tripod we took five pictures. These pictures gave us a rest before the action started. After that we moved the creatures a little amount and then took another picture. We repeated this procedure 80 to 100 times.

 

Next we had to take the pictures from the camera onto the computer. We used a movie making piece of software to run one after another. We wanted the pictures to run at 10 frames per second. This made the creatures look like they were moving.

We hope you enjoy it.

Making human caterpillars!

We decided to have another go at animating ourselves today and Mrs Davies helped us to get a little more organised. We got into two lines and the front person led us around in small steps. After each step we took a picture and then put them altogether to make our new movie. We were surprised that our 69 photographs became only 6 seconds of movie when we put it together, we worked out that this means that about 11 pictures makes one second of film.


We've put our new film below for you to enjoy. Next week we are going to try animating characters we have made out of pipe cleaners so do check back to see how they turn out.

A real author comes to visit!

Gwen and Viola tell us about a visit by the author Dr Michael Oehley to Room 8 yesterday.

On the 26 of April 2012 Dr Michael Oehley came to Rm8 to tell us about his second book called The Vitality Code.He told us about himself and that he had been writing since he was 5. Now he is an emergency doctor. He also told us about his first book called The 4 powers of Daren Saner, it took him 13 drafts and 6 years to write! He talked about his travels and how that helps his imagination. We asked him to tell us some tips for young readers, Michael’s advice was never give up.

It was a great experience to have a real author to come to our class!

You can find out more about Dr Michael Oehley and his books by visiting his website http://www.michaeloehley.com/

Animating ourselves

We have learnt that animations are made up of thousands of pictures that are slightly different to each other. Normally this is done by drawing or on a computer but we discovered today that we can animate ourselves in the same way. By taking small movements between photographs we can make ourselves move in cool ways that we wouldn't be able to do in real life. Mrs Davies showed us a music video by the band Ok Go where they use this technique to create interesting movements and then we had a go ourselves. Below are the Ok Go video and then our attempts. We might ave another go tomorrow to see if we can get even better at it!

(Ok Go - End of Love)

Animation

This term we are learning about animation, what it is and how it is made. We have found out that animations are made up of lots of pictures, each with a small difference to the one before. When these are played quickly our brains are tricked into thinking the pictures are moving. 


To explore this idea we made some little flip books. A flip book is made up of lots of little pictures which the watcher flips through to watch the animation. Flip books have been around since 1868 when John Barnes Linnett created his kineograph (kine meaning movement and graph meaning picture). Our little flip books have two pictures and you roll the top picture back and forth across the bottom picture to see the movement. It was important to make sure the changes we made to our pictures were only small so that our brain would be tricked.


Mrs Davies has made a little video of some of our flip books so you can see how they turned out.

Antarctica Videos

The first of our Antarctica documentary videos are done and online for you to enjoy. We have learnt that Antarctica is a very special place and we loved finding out about the amazing creatures that call Antarctica home. It was also a lot of fun making our films.


We hope you find them interesting and would love to hear your comments. You can find them on our Antarctica page (Click here to go straight to our videos!).

Some pictures from our time at camp

Here are some of the pictures of our adventures at camp. We all had a great time and will be sharing more about it when we are back in school after the Easter holidays.

Personalize a free scrapbook

Watch our rafts in action

We thought you might like to watch us in action. Here's a little video of us building and trying out our amazing rafts. It was a real blast and every raft made it out to the platform across the lake and back in the end. 

Our rafts

Raft making was a great success with some amazing crafts built and successfully sailed across the pond. There were quite a few squeals and lots of laughter.

We're building rafts!

We are currently at the rafting lake working in teams to try and make a raft to get to the other side. I wonder if our ideas will work!

An action packed day!

We've been having a blast! Yesterday we had a go on the hydroslide, the mud slide, kayaks and the flying fox. Everyone has their own favourites and we will share some writing about them when we get back to school. To whet your appetite here's a picture of us trying to raft up on the kayaks.

What a day!

Well it's been a busy first day for Room 8 at camp! We set off from school at 9:30 and headed to the Hakarimata Ranges for a lovely bush walk. It was a hard climb up but the view from the top made it totally worth while.


From there it was off to camp to set up our bunk rooms and a bit of a orienteering. Then we headed up into the bush chapel to present and sign our class treaties. It was a lovely place to share and to sing some songs. Here's a little video of us singing one of our songs.

Tonight we have split into two groups and Room 8, Room 9 and Room 10 made some little candle boats which we then floated on the boating lake.


Tomorrow we start on our main activities so check back tomorrow to see how we went.

We are off!

Here we all are ready to go off to camp! Wish us luck!

Off to camp

Room 8 are off on camp on Monday to Ngaruawahia Christian Youth Camp. We are all pretty excited about what's in store for us. We will be testing ourselves on the flying fox, mudslide and hydro slide as well as taking part in some team challenges building rafts, playing Capture the Kingdom and doing a confidence course.


Technology allowing we will be sharing some of our adventures with you while we are away so please keep checking back to see how we are doing and don't be afraid to leave us an encouraging comment!

Almost time for Camp

Room 8 head off on camp next week with the rest of the senior classes at Hillcrest Normal School. We are busy getting ready and some of us have been writing cinquain poems about what we think camp will be like. We'd love to hear what you think and hopefully next week will be able to update you on what we do while we are at camp so keep checking back.