Room 13's Learning Journey

We collect hand towels that have been used.
At our school we get the hand towels for our worm farm from the staffroom toilets and also from the childrens toilet area too.

We have to clean the buckets after the food scraps have gone into the worm farm because the buckets will get dirty. Using scraping brushes and a small bit of water helps.

Yay! we have another composting bottle in room 13. I made this composting bottle last Sunday. I feel very proud of my composting because I can watch everything break down each previous day. It encourages me to find out more about what happens when food is left to rot. This is good for my learning because I can learn lots. Please don't say "oho" or "that's disgusting!" because compost is very good for your garden. Worms are also good for your garden.

The cup shows the liquid that comes out when the organic material breaks down.

These are this weeks results.

For the plant that got worm tea we had: 7.5cm long leaves and 14 leaves. The results for the No Worm Tea plant was: 6cm long leaves and it had 14 leaves. For the worm tea plant, we are putting worm tea on it once a week. We have to put on one quarter of a cup of worm tea mixed with water. We can see a small difference already! Wait for next weeks results.....

Wow, Room 13... I have looking more closely at your planning for your speeches, and your opening introductions, and I am really impressed by the way you are: 

* thinking about your purpose and audience - to talk about an area   
   of sustainability that you care about deeply  

 * appealing to your audience's feelings through sharing your own  

 * researching in books, the Internet, and doing surveys around 
   school  to collect information, facts or examples to support what 
   you are saying. (I love the rubbish survey, and the Values survey 
   in a Junior room- this is excellent data to support your argument 
   and it is really connected to your audience)

20/ 08/ 10


This is a picture of Room 13's experiment. On the left you can see a pot with a bit of plastic sticking out which says ''Worm Tea'' and on the right you can see the words ''No Worm Tea.'' We are showing you how worm tea works. At our school we have our very own Worm Farm with hundreds and thousands of Tiger Worms.
This plant is called the Chinese Cabbage and we are going to use the worm tea on one of the plants to prove it really works. We predict that the plant that gets the worm tea will grow bigger and more quickly. We are going to measure and count the leaves each week. Watch this blog for next weeks results.

GA

Down at the stream that runs through Elm Park reserve, the year 6 enrichment from Elm park school and some Y4 students have been planting 260 trees on the side of the stream. One of the trees is called Kahikatea; it is one of the tallest native trees. We are planting native trees because at Elm park school we want more native birds, insects and trees. The Park and our EPS trees will merge together to make a great habitat for birds one day. I feel happy that we are helping the enviroment. HG

Here are some photos of R13 students problem solving during Maths Week last week. It was a really full week... The Maths Olympiad was on Tuesday and one of our teams won the Year 4 Olympiad which was very exciting. We did problem solving every day and used lots of different strategies.... 
We worked across our Maths groups...

On Friday the 13th of August Mrs H took some children from the Year 4 syndicate to do some planting near the Elm Park Stream. As I wallked there I was full with joy and excitement. We had some brilliant helpers called Adam and Robynne. They were sent by the Manukau City Council to help us children learn how to plant trees.

We planted around 90 plants today. It was very wet when we got there. I went there with IW, HG, RD, LH and OH. It was a lot of fun helping our environment. My most memorable time was when I was digging up the holes and I nearly slipped over. It was really messy and muddy.

I felt really proud of my effort today.
GA

On Friday the sixth of August 2010 I went planting with IW, BR, HG, AM, BV and GC not forgetting Mrs H. It was mushy, swampy, sticky and oozy with mud. This is a photo of my buddy and me planting.


Our goal is to plant 300 trees wow! We planted 85 of them. Today, another group planted 95 more. We planted natives called: Kohekohe, Kahikatea and Coprosmas. Coprosmas attract birds such as tuis, gray warblers, fantails and silvereyes. It was fun but we got very muddy. Thanks for reading our blog.
H-MS 

Last week, Miss Meikle showed us a wonderful video about ''Composting.'' I got really inspired by that because they even told us that we can make our own compost at home. Wow!!! I was really excited to go home and make some compost.


All you need is: A bottle, a foam circle, food scraps, cut up paper and a small towel, or a rag to keep the compost nice and warm. Yay, I had all the things I needed, I thought to myself. I ran home straight after the bell rang and as soon as I got home I got working on my compost experiment. If you come back to this blog, you will see another composting story.


You can see my PET composter picture that has alredy been posted.
IW

Last Friday The Year 6 Enrichment group planted 85 trees down at the stream as part of their Adopt a Park action plan for the term. They needed some helpers so HW, AM, BV, H-M S, IW, and GC from our classroom went to help out. As you can see the ground was very boggy after several days of rain. Gumboots and old clothes were needed. IW even thought ahead and brought a towel to school for the clean-up! 
These wonderful helpers can post their thoughts on the planting process...

At the end of last term Room 13 was busy on two art projects:

• the calendar art for fundraising
• working on a simple clay tile cutout based on our vase and flower drawings

In Week 2 of the term IW came to school with an old PET bottle and shared her composting experiment with us. Some students tried to get a photo of the bottle and what was inside it but it was hard to photograph it close up.


IW can make a post about what she is discovering through this mini-experiment and predict what will happen in a few weeks.

During Term 3 Room 13 will be learning how to take responsibility for  our worm farm at school. They are working with Mrs Meikle to learn the skills so they can take over from R15 students who have been doing a wonderful job of collecting all the organic material we recycle at school and taking care of the school's worm farm.

It is very exciting learning because Room 13 students have found out just how amazing our tiger worms are.

Here are photographs R13 students  took recently.

In Reading we are focussing this term on Inference. We have looked briefly at inference earlier in the year but this term we are really investigating what Inference is and all the skills we need to successfully make inferences when we read. R13 class members will add their thinking as the term progresses.

• We started by examining 4 simple sentences and we unravelled  what the people were doing by looking at all clues. We are learning to identify the clues given by the author from which we can make inferences.
• We learned that pronouns are really important when we are unravelling clues (he, she, they, them etc.)

• We began by defining what the word multiplication means and learning other words  for the "x" sign: groups of, sets of, lots of, multiples of. We agreed language is so important in maths! 
•  

In Writing we are focussing on writing a persuasive argument. We are all picking a topic we feel really passionate about to research for our speech. We learned about the Greek persuasive strategies that we still use today...

• Logos - using facts, numbers, information to inform our audience
• Pathos - appealing to our audience's feelings
• Ethos - developing our audience's trust and confidence
• Kairos - a call to action by our audience