Play: Lucky Dip

Jamieson's rocks and minerals

This morning Jamieson carefully brought two boxes of precious rocks to school.

Everyone chose their favourite one:

Francesca: "I like this one because it has patterns coming out from the middle"

Breea: "it's nice and smooth; really really smooth."

Amelie: "I like that crystal because it's quite shiny and I like the shape of it."

Breea wrote a poem about it:

Right and white
for everybody
sparkly and rough and hard
a pinch of red
of wool on the head.
I'm gonna call it Mark.
It's pointy on the bottom.
It doesn't hurt too much
a little grazed on the inside
a little grazed on the out.
It's middle name is Sassy
and it cannot be changed
by the law of Wellington's mayor.

 Joe: "I like them because they're quite shiny and they glow and the colour fades together and they're quite unique."

Aliya: "I like this because it's big and shiny and you can hold it easily. And it can't cut people and it's interesting."

Cody: "I like this one because it's shiny and pointy on the top and it looks like it has real crystal."

Noah: "I like all the details of both of the carvings of the mouse and the crocodile. They're both really cool."

Jamieson's dad carved this mouse when he was five years old, and he carved the crocodile when he was only eight!

From the left, we have obsidian, silver in the middle, and rose quartz on the right.

This is a Maori spearhead carved out of obsidian. Cody wrote a poem about it:

Jamieson's obsidian

Shiny and bright
all black, curved and Maori
off the top of a spear.

Luca also wrote a poem about it:

Knife

Its smooth surface
glints like the sea on a dark moonlit night.
I turn its crinkled lining up to the light
and it turns a pale milk colour.
The knife.

This is a fossil egg. Laila wrote a poem about it:

An old man, old and young
was having fun
today.

One day an animal came out
out came a dinosaur,
a triceratops.

Mel wrote a poem about this rock; it's a polished piece of amethyst:

Shining bright
under the light,
it curves and swirls.
Cracks widen
and let out
happiness of purple.
Shining bright
under the light,
swirly whirly twirl.

The ginormous crystal | by Quinn

The crystal shines in the sunlight.
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it.
I said to myself, who brought in this crystal?
It is amazing.

POETRY SLAM

On Monday we had a poetry slam. We were celebrating the fact that we've now had more than 2000 visitors to our blog, and combining this with a chance to share all the fantastic poems we've been writing lately.

Slam Poetry is a way to perform your poems for others. We also drew our inspiration from the Beat Poets, a generation of writers from the 1950s who used poetry to tell the world about their ideas. As well as some fabulous costumes,

we even had Beat-inspired food!

In the afternoon everyone had a chance to perform a poem - we'll post these performances to the blog soon...

Our poem of the week: Windrest

Each week we have a poem of the week. On Fridays we handwrite and illustrate it. This week our poem of the week was Windrest, by Laura Ranger, a young New Zealander who had a book of poetry published when she was 10 years old. She wrote this one when she was 7.

Here are Noah and Jet's illustrations of Windrest:

WINDREST

At Windrest cottage garden

the wind has a holiday

from blowing.

It rests in the summerhouse

while the sweet birds sing

and red roses clamber

up the fence.

I walk barefoot

in mud and grass

past the waterlilies

and flowerbeds.

Shhhhh the flowers

are sleeping

and the hydrangea

is night blue.

I find a small

treehouse

where sweetpeas

tiptoe up the wall.

The wind is homesick

and feeling faint.

She arrives home sighing

in the garden.

A dovecote sways

in the olive tree.

Laura Ranger, age 7

Our multiple intelligences

Today we were thinking about the health of our BRAINS.  We looked at a whole lot of pictures of kids doing different things, and discussed what we think they might be good at.  We wrote these ideas in yellow.  As we placed the pictures on our poster, we thought about how these talents might be connected, and tried to place and group similar talents together.  Then we talked about Howard Gardner.  He has done a lot of research on how we think and has come up with a theory of multiple intelligences, describing how different people's brains work in different ways.  When we looked at his list of multiple intelligences we found that it was very similar to ours.  We stuck his words (in white) alongside our own ideas.

Howard Gardner says, "All of us have the full range of intelligences; that is what makes us human beings, cognitively speaking. No two individuals—not even identical twins—have exactly the same intellectual profile."

Our intellectual profile is a way of describing which intelligences we feel more or less confident in.

Tomorrow we're going to think more about our own intelligences.   Which do you think are your strengths?  Which do you want to develop more?

Grrreat graphs

This week we are learning about pictographs.  Earlier on in the week we made a pictograph showing what we did on holiday.

Yesterday we started making M13's hair colour pictographs.  First we sat in a circle and said the colour of our hair.  Amy made a tally on a piece of paper, for each hair colour. The most people had light brown hair.

Then we made our own graphs.

We talked about what makes a good pictograph. We agreed that we needed to:

1. measure the width of each column evenly
2. draw pictures of the hair colour
3. write a title and underline it
4. keep the columns straight
5. show accurate data
6. be neat

Using these criteria, we marked our graphs ourselves using red pen.  Then we had a look at each other's and decided which ones were good examples to put on the blog. Here they are:

By Noah

By Saoirse

By Meline

By Peta

By Francesca