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!