Daffodil Day

Today in New Zealand it has been Daffodil Day. Daffodil Day is a day when we commemorate the people that have suffered with cancer or are fighting cancer.
When one of our wonderful Year 8 students was researching Daffodil Day she saw that one in three kiwis are affected by cancer whether it is if someone in your family that has suffered from cancer or a friend has suffered from it. Those figures really affected her.

To celebrate this special day she decided to make a little video showing why people wear a daffodil and what it means to them to where one. For her, she wore it for family and for anybody that has had to go through that experience of having to fight against cancer.

In the making of this video Grace found  that our younger children didn't really know what it meant to wear a daffodil. Because of that she now wants to make our children more aware of what it means to wear a daffodil and what cancer is and how people/families are affected.

"I feel that kids need to know how big of a problem it is and how they can help people to get better." stated Grace. "So if you would like to help out please donate to Daffodil Day so that we can help find cures and support those going through treatments."

This is the video that Grace made for Daffodil Day.

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What's All This About Recycling???

This week, Rimu class got the opportunity to visit our local Waste Management Sites to look at Recycling. The trip was a chance for us to reflect on how much we are personally recycling and what we can do to help our families recycle more and therefore create less waste.

We firstly looked at Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover and Residual Disposal.

Chris (the Educator for Waste Management) told the group that went in the morning that they were only the second class he's ever worked with (and he said he had worked with lots!!!!) to ever get the words in the right order on the first go.  Way to go guys, that was an awesome effort!

After that the children had to go through the process of recycling items that people put in their yellow bins, just the way the machine at Eco Sort does. They had to sort all of this waste starting with removing all the contaminated objects (those things that have been put in the yellow bin but that just can't be recycled).

Next the children worked in pairs to match up raw materials with what the material looks like after it has been recycled and an object it has been recycled into. Not the easiest of tasks.

Finally we headed off to the Eco Shop and each pair was given a budget of $500. We had to pretend we were leaving home for the first time and setting up a new flat so we had to find items for our flat. We were surprised at the amazing bargains we could get. It was really exciting to "shop" for our flats. We found some great things but unfortunately we couldn't find beds but we decided that was ok and we would just sleep on the really comfy couches we found :)

Recycling Rocks!!!!

Woohoo it's been Maths Week!

What an amazing Maths Week we have had. The children have been engaged in creating tiny houses based on certain criteria they were given. They used measuring skills and learnt about area and perimeter too. There were some challenges in fitting everything in but we are pretty happy with the results. Have a look at some of the finished products.       

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Problem Solving

Every second Friday Rimu class works on a math problem. These math problems are based on the idea of low floor, high ceiling - problems that all can access and all can try different strategies to solve it. There are no wrong ideas, or wrong answers, just a good step into the learning pit. 

This week we worked on a Jo Boaler problem called Toothpicks. We had to work out how many toothpicks were in a 3 x 3 shape, without counting. We then went away and worked on the problem of a 2x2, 4x4 & 13x13. How many strategies can we make for each shape? We were super lucky because we had Miss Adams in to help us.