Term 2 Reflection

Taking Action

Today we read a text called Global Action. We discussed how there is so much plastic in the oceans and how we need to do something about it. Yesterday we read another text and talked about the sustainable business's and the non sustainable business's. One of the non sustainable business's we thought of was McDonald's . We said McDonald's because there straws are still plastic and some business's have changed to paper straws. So we want McDonald's to change to paper straws as well. McDonald's isn't the only unsustainable business but it was just one we thought of. Because of this we are going to write letters to McDonald's about the amount of plastic they use and they are a popular business so the more people that go there the more plastic there will be. We also thought about the sustainable business's that use less plastic weather they use compostable bags or paper straws. We want to promote those business's and support them for what they are doing.

Once we had read and talked about the text (global action) we watched some videos about the pacific garbage patch and the amount of plastic in the oceans. The pacific garbage patch is a big amount of plastic that is about 1.6 million square kilometres in size and is bigger the double the size of Texas. Others videos we watched were about inventions people are making to help get rid of the plastic in the oceans. That is also a task on our contracts. We have to design a way to clean up the plastic in our oceans.

After watching some videos we looked at some sites about it. We found one that when you go on to it, it counts how many pounds of plastic that has gone into the ocean while you've been on that site. The sad thing was that the numbers were moving really fast and it only took around about 5 seconds to reach 1000 pounds of plastic.

Contracts

In my class we do contracts. Contracts is where we have a piece of paper that is glued in our books with about 10 to 15 different tasks to complete. We get the whole week to complete and finish our contracts. Some of the tasks are must do's and some of them are can do's. Must do's are things that are a higher priority and we aim to finish all of them by the end of the week. Can do's are task's that are a can do so we don't have to complete them and we normally only do them if we finish all our must do's. So we usually do can do's towards the end of the week. On our contracts there are more must do's then can do's. There is about 10 must do's and around 3 to 4 can do's. Each week there is always a couple of new things that haven't been on the contracts as well as some of the same things from the previous week. But when we have some of the same things from the week before it is not the exact same, for an example when we do words of the week we always get 4 different words each week. So it is the same task but different words or questions.  During lockdown before we went back to school. We did a survey. The survey was about if we wanted to keep our contracts integrated or 1 maths contract and 1 literacy contract. The reason we did this survey was because before lockdown we had one maths contract and 1 literacy contract but during lockdown we had our maths and literacy all on 1 piece of paper. And we choose to keep our contracts integrated, so now we have the maths and literacy tasks all on one page. On our contracts there is lots of different learning and we don't work on our contracts all day we only work on them for an hour or 2 and then we move on to other work. Here is a photo of what our contracts look like.

Rainforest Research

For the past couple of weeks we have been learning about rainforests. We have learnt about the different rain forest birds and leaves. We have learnt why they are important and how they help us. And we have also done artwork and slides about it.

Last week one of the tasks that we had to do was write down why rainforests are important. You could present it how ever you'd like.You could do this by yourself, with a buddy or in a group.  Jaymee and I decided to work on a slide together. We first started off by researching and finding ideas to put in the slide.

Once we found the information we needed, we started on the slide. My first slide was about how the rainforest is home to animals and how the trees give us oxygen. While I was doing this Jaymee worked on reasons why we should stop cutting down the rain forests. The other slides I worked on was how rain forests provide food, how the help the water cycle and how some of the plants there give us medicines.

Once we had finished writing our slides we decided to decorate them. We made the background green on all of the slides and added pictures to each slide the goes with the topic. For and example for the slide about food we put pictures of the food that rain forest give us on that slide. Once we had decorated it and checked it we were done. Here's how it turned out.

Rainforest Art

This week we have been learning about rain forests so we did some art about it. We first had to research and find one rain forest leave that we liked. Then we practised drawing our leave on a piece of paper. Once we had practised drawing our leaves and were happy with the one we choose we were given a A3 sized piece of paper. When we got our paper we lightly drew out big leaves on it so if we made a mistake, we could rub it out and we wouldn't see where the line was. We made sure to draw out big leaves on the paper so it would cover most of the paper but not all of it. When we had drew out our leaves and we were happy with them we were given wax crayons to colour them in. The reason we used wax crayons was because we are using dye and wax crayons go best with it. When we were colouring in our leaves we tried to make them as detailed and realistic as possible. If we wanted the leave to look like it was far away we made it darker and then if we wanted it to look like it was closer we made it lighter. We also made our leaves coming in from different sides of the paper and making some over lap each other to make it look more realistic. Once we had coloured in all of our leaves, it was time to use dye for the background. There was lots of different colours we could use but I decided to use a light green. When we were doing our back round we also put the dye over our leaves to full in any spots we might have missed. Then after that we let them dry. Now it was time for the bird. We researched about different rain forest birds and choose the one that we liked. I choose a Scarlet Macaw. When we had chosen the bird that we liked we had the choice if we wanted to do our bird on an A4 sized paper or an A3 sized paper. The reason we did this was if we liked our background lots we could draw our bird on an A4 paper so it doesn't cover much of the paper or if you wanted your bird to be big you could do it on a A3 sized paper. I choose to do mine on an A3 piece of paper. Once we were given our paper we drew out our bird lightly on to it. Then when we were done and happy with it we coloured it in with wax crayons. After that we went over each colour with the same coloured dye. Then we let them dry. After that we cut them out, then with our left over paper, we cut out a strip of it then folded it and glued it on to our leaves piece of paper. Then we glued the bird on top. And after that we were done.

Level 1

We are now in level one and I am super happy and excited. All the way back on March 26th was when we went into lock down. We stayed in lock down till April 27th, then the next day we went in to level 3. We stayed in level 3 till may 13th, then on the 14th of may was when we went in to level 2. On the 8th of June was the last day of level 2 and a couple days ago it was the first day of level 1. For 18 days we have had zero cases of covid-19 and when level 1 was announced we were also told that there is zero active cases in the whole of New Zealand which is amazing.

In level 1 we can do a lot of different things. We don't have to stick to our bubbles, we can travel domestically and we don't have to social distance anymore unless you want to. We are now allowed to hug our friends and see family.  But even though we don't have to social distance any more we still sanitise and wash our hands to keep clean. 

Powerful Paragraphs

Recently we have started doing powerful paragraphs. Powerful paragraphs is where we are given an image and then we have to right a detailed paragraph about that picture. We don't just have to describe what we see, we can also write what we think is going to happen next or we can write as if we were there or if there was an animal in the picture we can write as if we were the animal. When we are writing our paragraphs we try to add in some similes and metaphors to make it more interesting. We have been doing this to help us improve our writing and learn about similes, metaphors and other things like that. We normally do them in the mornings as a starter activity and they are also really fun to do. We normally get around 10 to 15 minutes to write our paragraphs and then in the middle of that time we will stop writing even if we haven't finished and some of us will share what we have written so far. We have done about 3 powerful paragraphs so far but here is a photo of one of the pictures I have written about and also the writing I did for it. For this one I wrote what was happening and what I could see.

I can see the beautiful sunrise the sky's lighting up and all of the trees growing above. " What a great way to start my day ". There is bright green grass, chocolate brown trees and marshmallow looking clouds in the sky. I see the bright yellow sun blinding my eyes as it slowly rises.