Lisa Carrington Comes to YMS!

"I'm never washing my hands again!" uttered Bella. What a privilege to meet Lisa Carrington and hear her stories. We loved welcoming her with a haka powhiri and presenting her with some flowers. Her medals are HUGE!

It Takes Courage and Hard Work to Be An Upstander. Never Give Up Rimu Class!

In Rimu Class we are always trying to educate ourselves and practise doing the right thing, even when we don't like someone or something annoys us. 

It's hard - but important because we want to live happy and fulfilling lives. 

This week we have talked about being an upstander, not a bystander.

We learnt there were 4 upstanding things we can do instead of doing NOTHING.

1) Be a Buddy!

2) Interrupt

3) Speak Out: This one takes TONNES of courage. "That's mean - don't do that."

4) Tell Someone

For more detail, watch below! 

So go on and encourage others to be upstanders too!

Great Things are Done by a Series of Small Things Brought Together! (Vincent van Gogh)

Rimu Class has decided to record some quality blog comments in a spreadsheet. Each student has their own sheet and we are also learning to use the 'merge' button and the 'wrap' button. You can also see this spreadsheet better by clicking on this link here. 

Enjoy watching our progress in our writing!

Check out Bella N's blog post about 'How to Write a Quality Comment' - fantastic stuff!

Hi Guys! This is a video on 'How To Write A Quality Blog Comment'. Here are some tips:

How to Write a Quality Blog Comment - By Bella P!

The past week and a bit Rimu have been busy exploring how to write a quality blog comment. We split it up into three parts which we recorded on our class Padlets and you can see these in previous posts. 

Here is Bella explaining why she thinks she has written a quality blog comment on Ralph and Patrick's blog post on their trip to Queenstown. 

(Apologies for the blurry Screencastify - how do we make it clearer?)

Here is the link to Bella's comment and other Rimu students so you can see the fantastic writing clearly.

Knowledge is Having the Right Answer. Intelligence is Asking the Right Question!

Here is our third and final Padlet that shows how we are learning to leave quality blog comments. 

Today we practised asking relevant questions. First we had to explore what the word 'relevant' meant. Hannah said it means the question relates to the topic and it's meaningful. We all agreed with this. 

We know Patrick and Ralph's blog post about their trip to Queenstown pretty well by now, so we were able to quickly nut out a few questions. Things we explored further when practising were open and closed questions and we were wondering if it is going to be a 'Yes' or 'No' reply...how could we make our question open so more of a conversation begins? 

What do you think of our 'open and relevant' questions? What else might you ask Patrick and Ralph? 

Created with Padlet

When I Find New Information I Change my Mind; What Do You Do?

Here is the second of our three Padlets showing how we are learning to quality blog comment properly. 

Today we explored what it means to add new information. We looked at examples from Point England School; some people add links and some people add new facts - we all learnt new things about Queenstown. 

We learnt new things about Queenstown because we are continuing to look at Patrick and Ralph's awesome blog post about their trip. This might start new learning conversations...we're excited! What do you think of our new info? 

Created with Padlet

You can't live a positive life with a negative mind!

This week in Rimu we are really focusing on writing quality blog comments. We are using Ralph and Patrick's blog post about their recent trip to Queenstown to inspire our commenting. They attend Christ the King School in Auckland and are one of our blogging schools. 

Today we talked about how to make our first sentence in our comment positive and thoughtful. Here's the first of three padlets we'll be sharing this week as we go on our improving our commenting journey! Any tips for us?

Created with Padlet

Our 40 Hour Famine Results!

Alex from World Vision came to visit yesterday which was exciting. She told us our final total we raised was $1006.50! This year the money is going towards helping the children of Syrian refugees get some education while in their refugee camps. It costs $100 to train a teacher...if we raised $1000 how many teachers will we train?

Some of us also put 10 hours of our 40 Hour Famine towards our Community Service for our William Pike Challenge Award. We are HEROes!

Our Olympic Celebration Winners!

This post is a follow up our Olympic Celebration post a couple of weeks back that we wrote and shared with you all. At the end of The Olympics we counted up the medal tallies for all the countries.

The winners were: Germany! (Jesse, Nikita & Gus)

2nd Place: Japan (Bella N & Tim)

3rd Place: France (Katie, Paige & Ariana)

We brought in lollies and made them medals. It was good how the class did the tallies when Jesse and I forgot to. I really liked how when we sorted out the countries at the start everyone was co-operating and no one complained what country they were in!

                                                             By Violet (Year 6)