Sumdog Competition


We have entered a competition with other schools in the Manawatu/Whanganui region where we have to answer questions on Sumdog (which is maths!) to get points.

The more questions you get right – the more points you get! If you win, the prize is Sumdog money which you can use to dress your avatar or get into your garden or house.

The competition started last week and goes until tomorrow (so for a whole week).

At the moment WE ARE FIRST!!! Isla and Tyler are in the top 10.

Room 11 is trying really hard to catch us, so we need to make sure we stay ahead!

We have really enjoyed this competition it is helping us with our maths.

Do you use sumdog?

Where Are We?

Today, Whaea Stacey showed us some photos of some places she had visited – except she was in the same clothes and pose for every place! Some of us quickly realised that she was tricking us and had somehow faked the photos!

We learned how to add a background into a Google Slide of a place we would like to pretend to be. We then took a photo of ourselves (or had a friend take one if we wanted a whole body picture) and uploaded our photo to remove.bg. A few of us needed to do some extra touch ups as there was still people or something else in the background.

Mrs Vickers is going to use this idea again with us next term when we are doing a history topic on where our families are from as we will be able to put ourselves into that place. It is also a cool idea to use to help with reading or writing topics!

Check out our slide deck below:

Kawa of Care

Today we learnt about Kawa of Care for our chromebooks.

We made a list of things we should be doing to look after our devices. This is our list:

  • Hug hold our chromebook when walking
  • Press gently on the buttons when we are using it
  • Close the lid if you are walking around with it
  • Shark your lid when the teacher (or anyone else) is talking
  • Only go on the websites you are allowed to go on
  • Don’t have food or drink near your device
  • Only use your device outside with permission
  • Only use your device at the table
  • Gentle hands when closing our chromebook

We took pictures of some of us showing how we can follow these rules and will put the pictures up around where our chromebooks live.
Hug Hold your Chromebook
Shark your lid when the teacher is talking
 Gentle Hands when typing
Only be on websites you are allowed to go on
 No food or drink next to our chromebooks

We then did a kawa of care quiz where we had to answer questions about how to look after our chromebooks, we only got 2 wrong so had to do the quiz again until we got 100%.

How do you show that you look after your chromebooks?

Tricky Touchpad Tips

Today we learnt how to use the touchpad on our chromebook.

Most of us found this pretty tricky.

We were learning how to use the polyline tool to follow a dot to dot. This was the most tricky because we had to click once, then move our mouse and then click once again and repeat this for all the dots. If we accidentally clicked twice we had to start again.. When we did finish the polyline dot to dot we realised it was a star!

We also got to do a puzzle game where we had to drag pieces together to make the puzzle look right. You could give this a go here: Drag and Drop Jigsaw

Finally, we learnt how to take a screenshot of our work – you press control, shift and show windows and you can either take a whole screen shot or a smaller screen shot of part of your screen.

We will keep practicing using our touchpads so we can get even better!

Do you have any tips for using the touchpads on your chromebooks?

Kōwhai @ Levin North School

Kia Ora From Kōwhai Kids!


Hello, Kia ora, Bonjour, Nǐ Hǎo and welcome to the super amazing Kōwhai class at Levin North School. Levin is in the bottom half of the North Island of New Zealand, about 90 minutes north of Wellington and 45 minutes south of Palmerston North.

We are a class of 21 year 2 and 3 learners. We have the best teacher in the school because she is really good at helping us with our learning, she is kind, caring and beautiful (and a little bit crazy). Mrs Vickers makes our learning fun! We also have a really cool class pet – a turtle named Leonardo (or Leo for short!)

In Kōwhai Class we like learning about maths, how to write, phonics and spelling, art. We use learning apps like StepsWeb, Sumdog, Epic, Sunshine Online and typing club. We also have lots of books and activities to help us with our learning when we aren’t using chromebooks. We also have Whaea Stacey coming in this year to do some Cybersmart with us.


Outside of class we have Kapahaka, Pasifika (which we do Jandal Jam) and Showquest. We also get to bring in our bikes, scooters, rollerblades or skateboards any day of the week but on Wednesdays and Fridays, the seniors put out all the ramps we have at school so we get to go on those as well. We need to make sure we bring our helmets in for this so we are being safe, and if we forget there are spare ones we can use. We also have a really HUUUUGE field where we can play soccer, rugby, touch ball, duck duck goose and ultimate tag. We have lots of trees around our school and if the tree has a smiley face spray painted on it, we are allowed to climb it! We also have a school pool and really awesome playground!

Our school has 3 values which are: Manaakitanga (We value ourselves, others and the environment), Kotahitanga (We own what we do and we belong; A sense of being together) and Manawanuitanga (Determination- never give up ). We have a few murals that we helped paint around the school showing these values.

What values does your school have? What awesome learning and activities does your school do?

Please ask us any questions you would like to know about us here in Kōwhai Class at Levin North School!

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