End of Term Fun!

This week because it is the last week of school, we had a selection of activities we could choose from including: body synth, where you used your body to make different sounds with the instruments; semi-conductor where you used your arms to conduct an orchestra; auto draw, where you can draw simple shapes and it will guess what you are trying to draw – you select the image and can create a beautiful piece of work or scratch, where we could practice our coding.

Here are some pictures of us working.

The favourite activities in our class were body synth and auto draw.

Have you tried any of these activities?

 

Interland

In our cybersmart sessions over the past few weeks, we have been learning about being kind online and what to do if something goes wrong online or upsets us.

For this weeks lesson, we played Kind Kingdom on Interland. If we got our certificate for this, we were allowed to have a go at another land as well. Isla actually got 2 certificates and nearly started on her third before it was time to pack up!

Check out how many of us got certificates! (Some of us also finished Kind Kingdom, but forget to claim our certificates – oops!)

Have you played interland? What is your favourite land to play?

 

Learning Support Awareness Day

Today is Learning Support Awareness Day. We all wore purple to show our support for the amazing teacher aides we have in our school.

Our Teacher Aides are great because:
-They help us with our learning
-They help us out in the playground
-They help our teachers in the class to make their job a little bit easier
-They are nice are caring

We get to have a disco at lunch time where there will also be some prizes.

Did your class or school do anything for Learning Support Awareness Day.

Tongan Tapa Cloth – Ngatu

Mālō e lelei!

As this week is Tongan Language week, we spent some time learning about Ngatu (Tongan Tapa Cloth), including the patterns that are used, and why, the colours and material used. Lots of the inspiration is found in nature or from ancestors.

We then got to make our own small ngatu using shapes, lines and colours in Google Draw. We then used the gradient fill on our shapes to give it some texture.

We noticed in the video and pictures that most of the ngatu used browns and other earthy tones, but that some also had bright colours, so we could use either.

After we had created our own ngatu we took one (or two for some of us) of our designs and copied it over to the class shared ngatu. As this was on a shared Google Drawing, we had to be sure not to delete anyone elses pattern and make sure we did not make copies of things we didn’t need.

Ours isn’t quite finished yet, but here is what we have created so far. What did you do to celebrate Tongan Language Week?

Hiwa-i-te-rangi

This week is Matariki, so we have been doing lots of learning about Matariki. In our Cybersmart lesson we edited stars in Google Drawing and added in pictures of ourselves as well as some designs. We then added 2 wishes, dreams, desires or hopes that we want to come true over the next year.

What did you do in your class to learn about Matariki?

Hot Air Balloon

On Monday morning, many of us got to school to discover a hot air balloon on our field! It got here about 8:30am, and at 9am it started to be inflated (which means blown up).

To make it go up, they used fire. The fire made it go in the air because it made the air inside the balloon hot (and hot air rises).

It only took about 5-10 minutes for the balloon to be filled. Because the ropes were still connected to the ground, the balloon did not fly away.

Mrs Vickers was one of the lucky teachers who got to go up in the balloon – we’re not sure how high she went but probably about 10 metres.

When it had all finished, the hot air balloon people let the balloon back down and put it in a truck to take back to Hamilton!

It was really exciting, and we hope that we get to see another one one day.

  

The person who brought the balloon to our school, is an ex-student whose Dad used to be our Deputy Principal many years ago.

Animations

Over the past 2 weeks, Whaea Stacey has been teaching us how to use Google Slides to make animations. Here are the steps.

Step 1: Find a background you like (or you could create your own)
Step 2: Find a character you want to use, and remove the background using remove.bg
Step 3: Place your character on your background.
Step 4: Duplicate your slide (control + d)
Step 5: Move your character a little bit
Repeat until you have finished.

Some of us wanted to change our background, so we had to make sure our character had moved off the slide before we changed it (because it can’t teleport!)
If you wanted to add a second character, you just follow the instructions again. You can put your 2 characters in a group to move them at the same time.

Here are some of our animations. We hope you like them!

Ida

Isla

 

Google Docs

Talofa Lava!

This week in Cybersmart we learnt a bit more on how to use Google Docs.

We practiced changing our font so it was bold, italic or underlined. We changed our font style, size and colour.

We also learnt how to add in images (through our camera, the internet or a drawing) as well as insert images and special characters.

The coolest thing we learnt how to do was Voice Type! Some of us already know how to speak into our microphone to search things, but now we can type onto our Google Docs as well! Very exciting!

We haven’t all quite finished, but here are some of the screenshots of our work:

What is your favourite thing to do on Google Docs?

Google Draw Creatures

One of our Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu Classes – Team Koru from Glen Taylor School had a post up a few weeks ago about using Explain Everything to create dinosaurs with their heads. We really liked that idea and wanted to do one similar, but because we use Chromebooks and not iPads we had to do it slightly different.

Today, we got to create a creature on Google Drawings using either the polyline (which is still a bit tricky for some of us) or lots of shapes together to create a creature of our choice.

We then took a picture of just our heads and used remove.bg to remove the background and anything extra that was still in the picture. Finally, we put this picture onto the head of our creature. It was really fun. We hope you enjoy them!

Personal vs Private Information

This week in Cybersmart we learnt about what is OK to share online and what we shouldn’t share. We watched a video, made a list and then sorted out pictures to say whether we thought things were personal or private information.

We then used Google Drawing to make a picture where we dragged in things about us that we thought it was OK to share. We decided that it was not OK to share our phone number, home address or date of birth. Everything else on the outside of the drawing was OK to share with everyone.

We also learnt how to change the background on a google drawing, how to replace an image and change the word art to our own name.