MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

Hi again, and farewell!

The last three weeks were very busy and on Friday we farewelled the Year Sixes as they head off on their holidays before beginning their new schools next year.

It was really nice to have parents and staff here for a shared lunch, followed by some words of advice from Mr Richards (the BOT), Mrs Pask (Bible in Schools) and Mr McKenzie (Principal).

Mrs Coyle handed out everyone's current and previous Achievement Reporting Books - quite a pile for those who have been at Edendale School since they were five!

Friday followed a very successful week of concert practices and performances.  We had a matinee on Wednesday afternoon and held our prize-giving concert on Thursday night.

Congratulations to Anton for being selected as the top Year Six student for 2011, being awarded the Jubilee Trophy and Honours Board prize; the full list of prizes is available here on our wikispace achievements page.

Thursday was the last day for the Year One-Five pupils, with the Year Sixes returning on Friday morning to help with final tidy-ups and to have the special lunch.  Thanks to the Home and School for helping with the lunch.

Our Pupil Power elections were held on the Tuesday, with pupils from Rooms Tui and Kereru and Kokako all voting at our special election booth in Room Kokako.


Maria issuing the ballot paper to Kieran.





Voters in action




Keryn issuing a ballot paper to Thea.



The official counting team

Results for the Edendale Electorate were as follows:
PARTY VOTES                                   CANDIDATE VOTES
Smurf Party 10                                        Daniel Hart  10
Mickey Mouse Clubhouse 11                  Gabrielle Knapp  10
B.A. Team 25                                        Thomas McKenzie  30
Deadnuts 10                                            Keryn Casserly   5
DIYG  12                                                Mckenzie Smith  14
NZ Kiwis  7                                             Madi Fleming  5

So, as you can see, Thomas and the BA Team were very successful and we wish them all the best for their term in the Pupil Power Government!

Exciting news this week - we have all been waiting for Henny Penny's eggs to hatch and yesterday three chicks appeared - they are now all off to the post-natal maternity centre at the Milne farmlet where they can receive some safe chick-care! Well done Henny Penny and Steve the rooster!



Three fluffy black chicks - one day old!

The final Student Council event for the year was the disco - held on 2nd December with $91.05 funds raised going to our sponsor child Grace in Tanzania.  The Student Council also collected cans of food for the Salvation Army - check out the donations shown here! Thanks everyone!

We were thrilled to be able to perform our Kiwi Night Before Christmas recital at the school concerts - here is our dress rehearsal - enjoy!



And finally, we spent time this past two weeks with more art from around the world - Asian batik and Polish wycinanki (pronounced vy-shee-nan-ki) (paper cutting) - check out our tree of life papercutting designs:



So, to end, farewell to the Year Sixes, and happy holidays to all the Kokako pupils - enjoy your holidays and have a safe and Merry Christmas! See you all again in 2012!

Term 4 Week 6

Friday again and we are looking forward to the weekend!

Thank you to all the parents who were able to call in this week to review our goals with us - we have all improved immensely with many of us achieving our goals and others getting very very close!  It was great to be able to show you the evidence of our progress and to share with you other work that we have been doing and we hope you all enjoyed seeing our work.

We have taken our Achievement Reporting Books home for a closer look and will bring these back by next Friday.

This week the pupils will reflect on something we are proud of having achieved this year in Room Six Kokako...

Term 4 Week 5

Well well well! One month until Christmas - who would believe it has come around again so quickly! The year has been busy and we are all ready for a big summer holiday!
 

This week we have been flat out with finishing off our inquiry presentations - we have created posters explaining some similarities and differences between life in NZ and another country; we are now each making a shoebox diorama model to show one aspect of life in that other country and these look really effective! We have ‘travelled’ to all manner of countries including Italy, Spain, England, Tonga, Mexico, Mozambique and more!  We have learnt about clothing, food, sports, houses and celebrations.

Mrs Shepherd was with us for a couple of days this week and we ‘travelled’ to Australia to check out Aboriginal art and create some Dreamtime snakes and artwork – next week we hope to travel to Asia to do some batik and also to Poland to do some paper-cutting.

We will be busy also with practising for our super-fun item for the concert – we know you will all be highly entertained!


We are all excited about having our parents come in next week to review our goals with us and to see the progress we have been making.  It will be nice to show off the work we are proud of!


This week we will reflect on something we have learnt about the country we were researching...

Term 4 Week 4

Science experiment - making a candle burn in water! (?)

Today is Mr Pirie's last day with us and we wish to thank him for his input to our class and within the school over the past three weeks as he carried out his first year teacher trainee posting.  We have enjoyed his musical talents, artistic talents and his sense of humour and his natural style of teaching.  Pupils will comment about what they have enjoyed with Mr Pirie.

Term 4 Week 3

Hi again! Five days in the classroom this week and busy as usual!

Yesterday we had the privelege of going to Gore for the Fonterra Science Roadshow - we learnt about changing the properties of matter, the five senses and other scientific concepts to do with communication, movement and forces, light and sound.

There were many interactive displays as always and Hannah and Mckenzie also had the fun of helping during the two demonstrations - videos will be added soon!

This week the pupils will write a reflection comment about what they enjoyed at the Roadshow and what they would like to know more about...

Term 4 Week 2 - Pet Day

Excitement today as the Lower Mataura Valley Pet Day was held - attended by pupils from Edendale, Wyndham and Glenham.


The Wyndham Showgrounds were busy, with lambs, dogs, ponies, goats, calves, cats, birds and rabbits on show.

 The sheds were full of fruit and vegetable creations (some very clever designs!), beautiful floral arrangements, models, inventions...
...and lots of delicious-looking baking (thanks to Hannah who treated the staff with her chocolate cake afterwards - yummo!)

 
 Everyone from Edendale School who entered should be very proud of their efforts - well done to you all!

Thankfully the weather was mostly on our side and we got the day out of the way before the southerly squall turned up - the Tour of Southland cyclists will be pleased about that too, as they made their way through Wyndham just before lunchtime.


Thanks to all parents and staff and community volunteers who helped make Pet Day such a good experience for the pupils!



Mr Pirie helping Mrs Wallis with judging

 This week we welcomed Mr Graeme Pirie to our classroom for the next three weeks as he carries out his teacher-training posting for the University of Otago.  Mr Pirie is great to have with us as an extra pair of hands and we are looking forward to having him teach us for different lessons over the next two weeks.  We hope you enjoy your time with us Mr Pirie.

This week we have been writing and publishing our instructions on how to be a...(certain character) - these are very funny to read so look out for them on our pupil blogs!

For maths we are back in our numeracy groups and looking at multiplication/division. Our art for the next couple of sessions will be based on creating our own version of batik on cloth!

Term 4 Week 1 - the countdown is on!

Welcome back everyone!  We were all excited to be back on Tuesday - it was awesome to have Labour Day off school to be able to celebrate the All Blacks' fantastic win of the the RUGBY WORLD CUP!!  Well done guys, we are all very proud of you and think you all did a super job and are awesome Kiwi blokes!

We have all come back feeling refreshed from our holiday and ready for the last eight weeks of school - the last eight weeks at Edendale School for our 16 Year Sixes!  It will be sad to farewell our classmates as they leave for college and we look forward to enjoying their last term with us together.

So, what has been happening?

Our Pet Day pictures are ready to go - the theme is machinery and we worked them with pastels.
We have been completing some publishing of our responses to the Bear Grylls' recount that we read last term and preparing to write instructions on how to be a...(All Black, mother, shopkeeper, Santa Claus, kiwi kid, father, teacher, farmer, or Silver Fern).
We have begun swimming - Wed and Fri afternoons.

Last week of Term 3!

 What a week we have had!

Monday - starting our geometry (transformation) maths unit, writing stories based on Bear Gryll's experience of skydiving with a parachute that didn't deploy properly (he broke his back!) and getting into our miniball teams to practise for the tournament.

Tuesday - up to Gore for the Sports Southland 4-Sport programme Miniball Tournament - we had three teams entered and each team played five games in the round robin, with Black and Red teams heading into playoffs to end up in 8th and 2nd! 

Tip off for Team Red - great jump Maria!



Team Red in action in the final



Team White - displayed fantastic skills in every game!

 

Team Red - 2nd place-getters overall of 18 teams!



Team Black - 8th place overall!



There's nothing 'rusty' about Dylan's skills!



Great skills Team Black!

It was a fantastic day with all pupils showing super miniball skills in their games and great sportsmanship and teamwork.  A huge THANK YOU  to Mr Hart for coaching the Black team and to Mrs Curtis, Mrs Harvey, Mr and Mrs Read, Mrs Lindsay, Mr McKenzie, Mrs Wallis and Mrs Smith for taking cars and helping at the stadium.

We were all excited to watch the Red team take on Te Tipua in the final for 1st and 2nd - Red couldn't quite get enough points on the scoreboard to beat the experienced Te Tipua team but we are all very proud of the team for making it to 2nd place in such a tough competition.

Thanks to Lucy at Sport Southland for teaching us our skills this term.

Wednesday - we completed our parachuting stories or poems and began a recount about the miniball tournament; had our first visit to the Life Education truck where Richard helped us learn about four of the body systems that we have and what the liver does for us; and carried out an assessment task for our inquiry.

Thursday - we used tiles to create transformation art (using the tile to slide/reflect/rotate and create a pattern across the sheet); visited Richard and Harold the giraffe again in the Life Ed truck to find out about how to fuel our bodies to keep them healthy; and finished writing our miniball recounts. The big highlight was the ice-cream sundaes that we had for lunch as our end of term treat for working hard!

Friday - school is having a half day today and we are going over to the swimming pool to check that the water is wet enough and warm enought for everyone to use during the holidays - can't wait!! We also have our final raffle draw today - there will be bonus draws and no restrictions on how many times our name can be pulled from the box!!

Have a great break everyone - GO THE ALL BLACKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Term 3 Week 9 - K9 challenge!

This week we have been busy working on a special mission - to create parachutes for our K9 Special Force Squad (00Woof and 00Wag, pictured below) to carry out a not-so-secret air drop from the tower of the playground.  The agent has to be able to drop as slowly as possible, with a soft landing (due to short legs).  This means we have been trying to use what we learned last week about air pressure and this week about drag and streamlining as we design and build our parachutes.

Thursday morning was the day of the air-drop as the wind conditions were perfect (as in, there was no wind).  The air-drops took place with all parachutes taking between 1.22 seconds and 1.88 seconds. Most parachutes tended to fall straight down though a couple of designs did drift a little.

Term 3 Week 8

Monday: we are trying to catch up on our inquiry by combining it with our reading and writing for a few days.
Today we explored the physical phenomena of electricity - in our g3 groups we used Brain Box electronic kits to try and create some different items - an earthquake detector, a quiz board, or upstairs-downstairs light switches.

We learnt about circuits, currents, conductivity and batteries.

The video shows a group that were successful with their quiz game board:

Thursday: today we began to investigate air pressure - Mrs Coyle filled a glass of water, placed cardboard overtop and turned it all upside down.  Then she took her hand away and the water stayed in the glass!!! Daniel B was able to tell us this was because the air pressure was holding the card in place and stopping the water from falling - AMAZING!

We also took strips of paper and blew on them to see how the moving air (low pressure) means that the still air (high pressure) pushes against the paper to lift it up or push two pieces together. 

We also made paper wings that demonstrate this air pressure effect and then tried out some parachutes.

Friday: the travelling Art Roadshow was here at school - a massive truck art gallery! See the video to watch us having a look around...



Term 3 Week 7

An exciting time this week as yesterday we were finally able to go to our new library and issue books to take home! Mrs Tumataroa has done a fantastic job of getting it all ready for us and there were a tonne of new books for us to choose from.  We spotted immediate favourites that we wanted to read straight away and some of us are eagerly waiting for our classmates to return the books they had so that we can then read them!

 We have been gathering our information about our adopted country - we will be dressing up in a couple of weeks and bringing some food to represent our country at a RWC celebration lunch.  We will make posters about our country as well.

The Student Council competition for Edendale Junior Master Chef 2011 is beginning on Monday - Daniel B and William will be competing from our room, we wish them all the best (and are all available for any taste testing they need done!)

Last Friday some of us worked on personal responses to "Our Beautiful World" - the poem of the week; check out this video of three girls who created their own song to teach junior children that we should not pollute the world - today they performed their act to all four junior rooms and received a lot of positive feedback! 

Lastly...GO THE ALL BLACKS!

Term 3 Week 6

Today the 2011 Rugby World Cup begins and we are excited to have this happening in our country.

This week we all adopted different teams that will be competing in the cup: we are in pairs and are gathering information about our team countries.  We are enjoying finding out about the language, food, music, culture and places of interest of our countries.  We will be following our teams' progress closely!  In a couple of weeks we will have a dress-up day in our class to celebrate and present our adopted country.

Our native american indian weaving is coming along nicely - with our weaving we are telling the story of how the fly saved the river! Watch out for photos of our finished weaving on our personal blogs next week! 

On Monday some Menzies College Year 13 students came to spend the afternoon with us - we split into 3 groups and played cooperative games. It was a lot of fun.

We practised some more dribbling and passing with our miniball session on Tuesday.

This week we finished and published our Summer Memory recounts. We have written about swimming, boating, beach visits, and more! We used a lot of awesome details to support our main ideas and the stories are really interesting to read. Look for these on our personal blogs too!

Term 3 Week 5!

Halfway through already! What a week it was too!

We were very excited to have the official opening of our new Thomas Brydone Learning Centre on Tuesday.  The TBLC is an extra-large classroom where we can have school celebrations, jump jam, visiting performers and special events.

The library is on shelves at the back of the room and we can't wait to be able to get our hands on all the new books Mrs T has got waiting there for us!

Mrs Johansen and Hayden tell us about Thomas Brydone

Mr McKenzie welcomes everyone

Lanney from Room 5 Kereru gives the karakia



Board chairperson Mrs Heads, MP Eric Roy, Minister of Education Anne Tolley, Mrs Jo and Hayden



The room also has two small teaching spaces for small group work, and the back corner has a special e-learning room for videoing and animation - this week Kieran, Josh R and Tom have been learning how to use the animation software so they can be the experts who teach the rest of us what to do when it is our turn.

For the opening we had the Minister of Education, Mrs Anne Tolley, and MP Eric Roy, here for the official opening as well as many other special guests who had been involved with the building. We sang our school song and Mrs Johansen talked about who Thomas Brydone was.  We wish to thank Mr McKenzie for all his hard work over the past few years to get this new building here for us to use! It looks awesome!

We first used the building last week at the LMV Speech Contest - well done to Josh J for being the runner-up in the Year Six section!  All of the speeches were great and we had a lot of fun listening to them.

On Monday we were in the new Centre for a first aid lesson with Jo from St John's.  We learnt how to put people in the recovery position and also how to help them if they are choking.  We practised wrapping bandages on sprained ankles too. 

Two teams went to Waianiwa on Tuesday for the BP Technology Challenge - Madi F, Anton, Gabby, Kim, William, Renee S and Madi S, and Jordan had built two wind-powered racers, practised building a flagpole and then also had to build a catapault for a pingpong ball.  Unfortunately neither team was placed, though one team won drink bottles for their enthusiasm and teamwork.  It was a great experience for all involved and thank you to Mrs Knapp and Mrs Schreurs for taking the cars. 

Today we are celebrating Dad's Day - we have got a lot of dads, grandads and uncles in the school to join us for jump jam and games.  In Room Six some of us have shown our dads what we get up to on the internet and we are playing board games as it is too wet to go outside.  Thanks to all the dads who were able to drop by and visit.