This week we have kept learning about possibilities. We got more tasks but sadly I can only show 2 because the third is in my book! The ice cream one is my favourite one so far and we had to figure out the answers to some of the questions the task had. There was also a test question in maths buddy, a new learning platform we got introduced to! How much do you use probability in your everyday life?
Miss had sent us a slide of stuff we could do in get creative. One of the links that caught my eyes is the colour pusher! It's really fun and I loved drawing on it. Here are some of my favourite ones. Which one is your favourite?
We’ve been learning about statistics and how to show said statistics for a while now. I have learnt many different graphs but one of my favourites still has to be pie chart because of how easy it looks but challenging to prepare! Here’s some stuff I did for this weeks maths work.
During lockdown, my parents and I finally had time to get to my box of legos we got from a Wellington zoo that was collecting dust in a corner and finally finished it!
A couple new COVID cases has emerged again and the country’s back in lockdown for 3 days! For today, my family and I made dumplings. They were super delicious and I loved them!
The cat went into the void of endless sadness. He didn’t want to but the dog said “ there will be endless amounts of fish and catnip”. And he was sold. He leaped into the abyss and was never seen again. The dog chuckled and walked away. “ now mum and dad will love me more”, he thought as he went back inside his doggy door. But boom suddenly the cat came flying out of a magic portal with a magic carpet, a mansion, a limo, and a girlfriend (which the dog would never get). The dog was outraged and sad (he’d never get a girlfriend. Never have never will) “Boohoohoo” the dog screamed as he looked upon all the little kittens and the mansion and the limo with lots of little car seats for all the little kittens. The dog had never had a girlfriend let alone puppies. This all happened because of a disastrous rainy day in 1869…
It was a cloudy and wet day. Very bad weather if you ask me. Two humans were walking along the pavement, dodging puddles and other humans. But these humans were special. They came from 2021. Yes, they were time travelers here to destroy the world with COVID-19 because they hated their great grandmother-in-law on their uncle’s girlfriend’s aunt’s side. The woman pulled out a vial of the deadly disease and dumped it into a giant river. A little pup was thirsty and went to the river bed to inhale liquid. But of course, there was a virus in the river and suddenly the said pup became immortal, could talk to cats, and was able to open pocket dimensions. But on the downside, he was so ugly that only the time travelers ever adopted him (spiderman style).
The terrible end
We have been learning words in spelling and with this weeks words, have made them into a crossword to share with everybody! Did you get everything right?
We have been learning about angles and one of the tasks were finding the angles we learnt in real life.
We made a marble run to express our creativity though it isnt the best as its broken multiple times and we had to rework everything. Nikita brang the marbles and we cut out the cardboard and did multiple test runs before recording this. It might only be a few seconds but it took way longer to make. Do you guys like marble runs?
In reading we needed to do a research idea out of the research chart so I chose to research about these animals.
Where do pencils come from?
Pencil, an everyday object you might just glance at before walking away yet every piece of a pencil would’ve been in a long and endearing adventure before being put together and sold out to you. This writing report will tell you all about how a pencil reaches your hands and fingers.
Pencil lead, the silver-grey stuff in between the wood, is not actually lead. It’s made up of a non toxic material called graphite and some clay mixed in. For a softer and darker point of a pencil, you’d need to add more graphite then clay. Which means, you can’t poison and kill yourself with just eating some pencils though the graphite and clay can still damage areas of your gut.
Graphite powder is dug out of the ground first, separated and cleared from said rocks, and mixed together with water and clay. Then they are dried and compressed into cylinders, placed into a tube and squeezed out into your average pencil led shape. Yet the process isn't done yet. They bake the leads over 1000 degrees celsius, hardening the clay so it is as sturdy as you can get it. And finally, they place them in wax and fill in the holes in the lead so it writes easily on paper.
Cedar wood is the most common wood type made into pencils. It’s a softwood that wouldn’t snap under the pressure of our fingers and is a perfect candidate for mass production hence it being the most favourable one to use.
They cut the wood into blocks which then goes through a machine with a blade which cuts grooves into said-block which are then going to have leads placed into them later on. It goes through another machine that places glue into the holes. The wood pieces are separated so some have lead placed in while others are then placed on top of the block with the lead. The blocks of wood are compressed and are left to dry for an hour so the glue steadys. And finally the wood is ready to be cut. Machines shape and separate the wood and the pencils are then painted, sharpened and shipped out to be bought by people like you to use.
So now you know. A pencil comes from many areas and things from forests to mines. So next time you lose another pencil, think about how much time it took to make that little stick.
Nikita, Georgia and I are going to make a marble run as our next get creative but we are still planning it. So get ready for our fantastic video in the next 2 or few weeks!
For now have this peppa pig marble run video I found on youtube here!.
We have been learning how wind works and have created many wind-powered devices one of them being pinwheels. Pinwheels are smaller toy versions of wind turbines which does about the same job but much more powerful - windmill. It was incredibly fun to create and make and interesting to learn about,
and do you know how a pinwheel/wind turbine works?
Sitting at the front of the school
The surface of the pencil felt slippier then riding along on melted ice while in gumboots with no grips and as I jotted down some notes on my book, I had to readjust my grip ever so often. The sun shone ignorable rays of heat while the wind lazily crept by, barely swaying the tips of the trees.
My classmates chattered among themselves while cars zoomed by to who-know-where. But the teacher wanted none of that and yelled at us to “Shush!”, when I suddenly heard faint yappings of a dog. Not loud or quiet, but I could’ve missed the barks if I hadn’t sought out for any other sound that weren’t the people beside me.
But what did take most of my attention wasn’t neither sight, sound or smell. It was the feeling of the pebbles on the concrete bumping on my skin and the edge of the uncomfortable brick fence/wall stabbing into my back. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else without forgetting about how sore my back was even if I wanted to. Maybe, if I hadn’t chosen to sit where I was sitting, I would’ve enjoyed it better.
Time.
Time. He always knew he had less of this then others even from the start of his birth. He was wary about the disease he had since the age of 3. Cancer; he still didn’t understand much of it. All he knew was that his breathing was rapidly worsening day by day because of the thing growing in his lungs.
Lung cancer. That was the simple term that the doctors and his foster parents had explained to him. He’d see other kids the same age as him, 7-8 outside the house playing, enjoying life. But if he tried to go outside all that met him was suffocating attempts to grasp at air, and then coughing, coughing until blood swelled out of his mouth, but even with the blood, all his body did was push out more.
He could feel the end drawing near soon, his short life having the blinds pushed back into place before he could even show his performance all because his biological mother never cared about his health. If he had the energy to, he’d be angry, frustrated about his biological parents who had smoked when he was still just a fetus, about how he was a one in a million chance, and angry about how the doctors haven't found a way to cure his disease yet.
He wanted more time. He didn’t want to see the abyss yet; not now at least. He still wanted to make his dreams reality. He wants to be a race car driver zooming across the lanes as fast as sound, he wanted to be a fire fighter which saved homes and lives, he wanted to be an astronaut and explore new and wonderful planets.
He wanted to be it all. He’d reach out for the dream, it’s brilliant light glowing on him with hope. But when he was mere centimetres away from it, a chain of his cancer pulled his arm back, pulling and pulling him all the way to square one. The more he wrestled and tug, the chains only got tighter. Any attempts at treatment were futile and the chains only came back thicker. Time was running low and each time he was pulled back, it was further then when he had chased his dreams at age 4.
He needed more time, he had to reach his dreams before he dies. But life merely ignored his plead of helps because he was just one poor kid too sick to be saved out of the hundreds...
Royal Flush
I went first, feet tapping the ground as I raced towards Mrs Tennant and landed behind a couple of people. The first few infront had gotten none of the cards I needed and I didnt expect much either. The sun glared sun glared down at me and th ewind had disappeared completely which didn’t help that we barely had any shade to hide under, while the cicadas chirped like a blaring alarm.
Finally, came my turn. What would I get? A diamond? A heart? Or am I going to be lucky enough to get the club, the exact one we need? The teacher lifted the card and I stared blankly at it for a few seconds before realization suddenly slapped my across the face. I didn’t get a club. No, it was something even better then a club; a Joker! I snatched it off and raced back to my team. Were already in the lead. Good.
Hi. My names Kate and I’m a year 8. I’m a Chinese and my height is around 1.6-7 m tall and I go to Otaki College. I enjoy art and often enough, writing and my family consists of my parents and 2 siblings. I don’t have a favourite subject since I don’t have enough opinions on all of them. My favourite colours bubblegum red and I love chocolate though I’ll never bite down into liquorice. I HATE sports and I would rather do a really hard algebra question then run a 2 k running race.
Athletics Day
I caressed the singular leaf I had pulled off, before ripping a hole into its rubbery skin and attempting to shove my hand into the poor thing. It fell into halves, as I expected and the remains slowly drifted to the ground, joining its brotherliness in the line of being compost.
I had forgotten to bring green clothes for athletics day. Heck, I actually forgot it was sports day but I was lucky enough to have brought my normal P.E ones. But again I didn’t actually HAVE green clothes in my defence.
Pulling onto a bush of a bush, I snapped off a twig and again attempted to wrap it around my arm and knot it. But again, it snapped. Dang it. I raised my arm once again and tugged at the bush; when I suddenly pulled at what I thought was part of the tangle of leaves, when it separated from the tree while both sides of the line were still intertwined through the branches of the bush. Then I realised… vines! Beautiful stick like things that are a lot more bendy and is known for wrapping around things! Perfect.
So I begun to follow the vine-wrapping trail until I thought it was long enough and using my fingernails, snapped it and repeated the process with the other side. Once I was done, I tried to make a bracelet and guess what? It worked! With a confident grin, I finally left. Good. The rustling of the leaves were slowly sounding like they were laughing at me even though it only was a few minutes.
