Guest Speakers

This term's topic is Here to Stay- about Immigration to NZ. We have had guest speakers from the school and out of the school coming in to talk to us about how they immigrated to NZ from other countries.

The guest speakers I have seen are:

Cassandra Tauro who immigrated with her family from Zimbabwe to NZ at the age of 6.

Zimbabwe

Taya who  immigrated from the Netherlands to NZ at the age of 36.

Netherlands

I really enjoyed learning about their thoughts of NZ compared to where they had immigrated from.

Tournament Of Minds

Tournament of Minds is a competition held every year.

What you have to do:

There are different challenges

Applied Technology
Language Literature
Social Sciences
Maths Engineering

For each challenge you are given a problem to solve over 6 weeks.
My team did Applied Technology. Our challenge was the following:

Wearable Wretchedness
Make a wearable device that stores data.
It doesn't have to work but it has to look like what it would be like if it did work.
Present your device with an advert and a script within 10 minutes.
There were lots more rules to follow as well.

Our team's wearable devices were.....

The data catch and convert

The data catch and convert catches data through metal disks and is transferred to the unfiltered jar, bad data, where it is red.
It is then filtered through a tube to the good data jar where it is green. You can then use your data freely.
We used beads to symbolise the data in the jars.

The Data Catcher 2000

The data catcher 2000 sucks in data like a vacuum cleaner and stores it where you can then transfer to your computer and use it up as you wish.


On the day you have to present your challenge and you also need to do another challenge called the spontaneous challenge. The spontaneous challenge is when your team is given a problem and you have to work it out within a short space of time while the judges are observing you.

References

Tournament of minds NZ
Tournament of Minds

Te Papa Trip

On Monday the 4th of August our class went on a trip to Te Papa.

Our class got split into groups of 4 with one parent helper per group. We would stay with this group the whole way around the exhibitions in Te Papa. My group:

Parent: Mrs Everett
Jack
Davin
Ellie
Rose (me)

We had activities to complete on lots of different exhibitions around Te Papa.

Our group didn't know where the some of the exhibitions and we could not find some of the exhibitions, but luckily we could find the most important one- the WOW exhibition.

The WOW exhibition had displays of lots of previous WOW costumes. It also had videos of WOW shows. My favourite WOW costume was the dinosaur- although I can't remember the name of it.

My favourite part was lunch time because we got to go to the park.

School Commonwealth Games Day

Yesterday our school had a commonwealth games day.

Each of our whanau groups got assigned a continent. Then our whanau classes each got a a commonwealth country within that continent. Each class had to prepare a short performance- it could be a chant, a song, a power-point presentation, etc. The classes had flags, costumes and wore the colours of their country.

Our whanau got the continent of Europe.

My whanau class- Ms Lemmon- got England.

What we did for our performance:

We painted the England flag on our faces and made flags to wave.

We also had a queen to read out facts about England.

After performing and having morning tea, everyone went back to their whanau class to play a game. After 15 minutes a bell rung, which meant you had to go to another class to do another game. WE got points for sportsmanship, participation etc. The whanau class with the most overall points gets a award in the closing ceremony on the next day.