We have a few things brewing to put on the blog, including some math videos and some neat pieces of writing.  We are also about to head off to a performance at Auroa school as part of our own preparations for our production (which is going to be fantastic!!!).

In the meantime, here is a little task to see how clever you are.  See if you can solve this problem, feel free to ask any questions also.

What is it that you can see with the naked eye, seems to have no weight and yet the more of them you put into an empty container, the lighter the container becomes?

First correct answer gets 10,000 house points.

Good luck!

I have added a couple of new pages to the sidebar on the left.

The mean…median…mode…range page is where I have put a test for you all to complete that involves you solving problems like we have been doing in class.

The word wizard page is where you are to put interesting words you find in your novels that you are reading. So, whenever you are asked to find any interesting words in books you are reading, this is where they go!!!

Looking forward to some neat videos we are working on to show off some of the maths we have been doing, and PERHAPS a sneak preview of the production!!

Here is the poll to see what Occy’s legs represent in our class. Remember, you only have eight votes!

Today in writing we talked about not using cliches in our formal writing. Here are a few examples of what a cliche is…

blind as a bat, bite your tongue, bite the dust, clear as a bell, cut to the chase, beats me, behind the eight ball…

Your task is to come up with at least five more cliches and post them here.  You are not allowed to use ones that have already been posted by other students.

This is to test your knowledge about formal and informal words that we talked about today in writing. You have to get them all right to pass!!! Good luck!

In writing we are looking at writing Expositions.  We are making sure that our writing is formal when writing expositions and are talking about formal writing.  Today we discussed the difference between 1st, 2nd and 3rd person, knowing that most formal writing is in 3rd person.

1st person is when the writer is speaking about themselves and use the words “I”, “my”, “we”, “us”.
2nd person is you talking to someone else…using the words for an example like “you”.
3rd person is you talking about someone else…using the words like “she/he”, “they”, “her”.

We know that in 2nd person we use words like “you” to talk to other people, and your challenge it to let me know what type of writing uses this word and write an example.  First correct answer recieves 1000 house points.

Here is a selection of some great pieces of writing from Room 1.  Our focus for these was to include descriptive detail from our five senses, to include our thoughts and feelings and to use descriptive adjectives and verbs so it makes it more interesting to read.  I think these three girls have done a great job.  (If you click the pieces of writing it will make it larger and easier to read)

We have been calculating probability in class this week. This is one of the groups explaining how to calculate probability to solve a problem.

A while ago we all took a vote on what our classroom mascot should be.  A mascot being something that represented our class and something that we could throw around and take photos of in different places.  Occy the Octopus was the Champion.  BUT we have forgotten what things the legs represented.  SO, can you please post down ideas of what the legs on Occy could represent, things that are important to our classroom.

We have just had a great write-up in the Stratford Press about the stuff we are doing at Matapu.  Here is a snippet…

We have recently held a Hangi for a fundraiser for our school camp and to help with other school expenses.  The stones were piping hot when we put the food down and the steam from the wet towels and sacks was really, really…steamy!

We had to make a LOT of dinners with the Hangi food and there were a LOT of hands helping out.  Special thanks to everyone who turned up on the day and to those who helped with providing us with food and equipment, and to those who organised this event.  It was a great fundraiser and it was great to have so much help!!

One thing we seem to do a lot of is tree planting!!!  We have just planted another 100 trees along our fence line in the hopes of creating a bit more shelter.  Now we just have to wait for them to grow…

As part of our World Theme we had a few special visitors.  Can you guess where they are from?

At the moment we are looking at different things to do with other countries.  If you look in our theme page you can see just what things we are investigating.  Part of our learning involved reflecting back on things we can improve on.  One of those things was to improve our organisation, so we tried to plan more thoroughly at the beginning of our research this time.  We used these planning sheets to make sure our research was focussed and everyone had a job to do.

This is one of our projects about NZ Heritage we finished last term. Check out others on our Theme page on this blog!!!