Welcome to Room 13's Learning Journey blog. We are a class of Year 7-9 year olds in Auckland, New Zealand.
RSS

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Celebration of Learning Day

This open day for parents was lots of fun...
In Maths we were exploring 3-dimensional shapes and learning about faces, edges and vertices.



How many R13 students could fit into a one square metre cube??? Guess and find out below...







 Did you guess??
9 small to medium students!

Thanks to some of our parents who dropped in for a while to see what we were learning...











Enviro Learning

We have been inspired by some of the work in leading Enviro Schools... we have done lots of reading from our School Journals:

And lots of books on the saving of New Zealand birds:


 Just two of our favourite books...


Tiritiri Matangi Island Trip Re-scheduled

It was sad that we couldn't go to the island to see the way the island habitat has been restored...but we have another date to go in Term 4. We are going on Thursday 21 October. Let's keep our fingers crossed that the weather is settled so the ferry can run.


We have done a lot of reading about the history of the island. We looked at a timeline and we made inferences from the timeline's notes. We can identify all the birds that have been translocated to the island so it is going to be wonderful when we get there!!

Here is the link to the Tiritiri Matangi Island Homepage:
http://www.tiritirimatangi.org.nz/ 

(Image from Tiritiri Homepage)


Sunday, September 19, 2010

Our Interview with Arborist, Mr Webb



Important information we learned from Mr Webb:

Where should we start on our planting project and important things:
  • Start on the southern side of the back field.
  • Remove the pine and the eucalyptus trees (keep the oak trees).
  • Save the wood from the felled trees as this can be used for making benches etc.
  • Be careful what we plant near the lizard garden and the swimming pool- not good to shade the lizards and to have leaves falling in the pool.
  • We can plant in Summer if we mulch well. Tree Fellas are able to supply lots and lots of mulch free of charge. Mulch is chipped trees and shrubs; it smothers the weeds and keeps in the moisture to keep the trees alive in the Summer.
Planting Information:
  • Don't plant new trees on old tree sites - problems with roots from old trees.
  • Best size to plant is PB95- This size tree is usually about 1.5-1.8m in height. The trees need 4 stakes to keep them secure. Trees should be planted about 400mm deep- we need a hole about 400 x 300mm. Plants need to have a slow release fertiliser. We can plant bigger trees but they will be more expensive and they need more mulch or a watering system.
  • We need to plan for specimen trees around the field (the large, native trees that give good shade and provide food for native birds throughout the year), with companion plants planted around the specimen trees for extra protection. Some of the companion trees can get thinned out in the future. Good companion plants include kanuka, manuka and trees in the coprosma family.
Possible trees to plant and ones we may avoid:
  • Good trees to plant include: puriri (great food for wood pigeons and tui), pohutukawa (on banks or steeper ground), taiare (on level ground) and nikau palms on the banks.
  • Karaka trees are good for birds but the kernel on the seed is poisonous so we may need to avoid this tree in a school. The titoki tree also has toxic seeds.
We are still looking into other trees that could be good.


We want to thank Mr Webb for answering all the questions we prepared in advance.






Friday, September 17, 2010

Making Pudding to attract birds!!

We made a bird pudding in our class to take to Tiritiri Island to feed the birds. The recipe came from the Tiritiri Island Handbook. We made the pudding to take as a present. If it works we can make one to use  at school as well.
We put in broken bacon rinds and meat scraps, stale crackers and bread and bird seed. We put it in a bowl and then poured melted fat over it to make it set. We put it in the freezer but it is a mystery as to what it is going to look like when we take it out...
The pudding gets put into a recycled bag (we used an onion bag) and it gets hung up for the birds to peck.
(by GC, H-M S, LH, and GC)





Sunday, September 12, 2010

Working with an expert landscaper

    Mrs Yeoman is the landscaper that came to work with Room 13. She used to be a teacher but now   she designs and plants gardens. She loves working on schools and kindergartens.
Mrs Yeoman taught us about using bird's eye view when you draw a scale map. We are going to 
 design a plan for the large field here at school. We want to plant native trees to attract native birds. (OH & AS)

   
We learnt that you can only see the top of things when you draw bird's eye view on a plan (AA).

We all practised drawing in bird's eye view. (BR)

When Mrs Yeoman was teaching us she said that North is always at the top of a map. North is at the top, South is opposite, West is left and East is to the right. We found out that Gossamer Drive runs north south. The side of the field near the recycling bins is north and the side near the pool is the south side. (AM)
It was hard drawing in bird's eye view because we didn't know the rules before for drawing this way (YS & SL)



Mrs Yeoman showed us her plan for the Orakei Kindergarten. You can see how she was inspired by Maori designs for her design. Her plan shows trees drawn in bird's eye view as if you were looking down like a bird flying over.(BV & SM)


A scale plan that shows where the plants will be planted (J A-A)