Food Tech - By Mele

Today LS2 completed their last session of their rotation for Term 2. Our teacher was Mrs Heka, who takes care of food tech. Today we cooked Chop Suey from the background of Samoa. This rotations theme is all about cultural food. Since there wasn't an equal amount of students in food class, there was a group of 3: Avalon, Joel and I. Each person had their own roles to complete. Joel and I worked together to make sure that the dishes were done, and that the main ingredients were prepared to be added in, while Avalon was dicing the onion, chicken, and garlic. The equipment that we used from our trolley was: medium bowl, measuring cups/spoons, knives, cutting board, big pot, strainer, fork, and serving spoon. The ingredients were: mixed vegetables, chicken, soy sauce, boiling water, oil, vermicelli, and salt. We were told to remove the pot from the heat every 2 minutes, because of the stickiness from the chicken and vermicelli. At the end of the session, as always we cleansed down our top/bottom benches, especially the stoves/crum tray. While we were cooking our chop suey, Mrs Heka was getting the rice prepared. 

Maths: Presenting Our Maths Games by Jack

This morning, Learning Space 2 showcased the maths games that we have all been working on for the last 2 weeks. My maths game allowed players to practice adding and subtracting decimal numbers. My game included a total of 10 questions, 5 subtraction, 5 addition. A few features that my game included was a scoreboard, an animated calculator as a character, and a certificate at the end that would certify your score. This whole activity started last week where we first needed to plan out the layout of our game. We would do this for the first two maths lessons, and when it was complete we would start getting to work. The program we all needed to use was simple Google Presentation, and to make it into an actual game we would use the linking feature, and link different boxes to other slides in the presentation. I along with the rest of the class had such an awesome time the last two weeks, and we were happy to be given such a fun activity to complete. If you would like to play my game, I have linked it below.

140th Grimit Anniversary Speech by Nidhi

On Friday 10th May I gave a speech at the Fiji Girmit foundation NZ gathering. Girmit is the time when people from India were taken in boats to Fiji to do sugarcane farming. The word girmit comes from the word agreement. This year it is 140 years of indians in Fiji so The Fiji Girmit Foundation of NZ organised an event to honor our girmit ancestors.  I said a speech in front of more then 500 people. I was a bit nervous before going on stage but when it was my turn I just went on stage and said it. I was very proud of myself and so were my parents and the people who were there. I met a lot of people there. Everyone said that I am a very confident speaker. The chief guest for the event was Rt Honorable Sir Anand Satayanand. I was given the opportunity to garland him. I heard in the speeches that he was the Governer General in New Zealand from 2006 to 2011. A googled what a Governor General is and I found out that he is a powerful person who reports to the queen. I also met Phoenix striker, the famous Roy Krishna who was at the event to receive an award.

It was an interesting evening for me. I saw a lot of Ministers and also learnt more about my ancestors and their history. I am now interested to learn more and plan to do some research on my roots.

Waltzing Matilda by Jack and Giovanni

Last week for reading, we started an activity. The activity was to read the poem Waltzing Matilda by Banjo Paterson. After reading the poem, we needed to get into pairs, and analyse and unpack the  the poem. With this information we then needed to go through a couple of questions. This included which version of the poem did you prefer, the original or new version? What do you think the poem was about? And what Literary Devices could the poet use to paint a vivid image in our heads? Once those questions were answered, the final step was to create a DLO that would explain what the poem was about in a summary. To help keep our ideas in order, a template DLO was given to us which we could use to store our ideas. For this activity I worked Giovanni, and we had a lot of fun.

Tech DLO by Jonathan

Today we had our week 7 session of tech. Our focus this term is metal work. What we are creating in tech is either a pizza cutter (Which is what I'm creating) or a cake server. So far, I am up to finishing the handle for my pizza cutter  . What I am doing to my handle is making it more smooth and getting the mark of it , and sanding it with rough grit sandpaper. I am having a lot of fun in tech, and when I finish on my pizza handle I will have to work on the cutter part.

Inquiry: DARE | Impact Message by Julian

This term, our focus for inquiry is DARE. It is a program that allows children to learn the dangers, and consequences of drug and alcohol use. Yesterday, Constable Cyrus came into our class to give us extra information about the use of them. We want to give a big thanks to Constable Cyrus for going out of his way to help us. This week, our challenge to alert others about these dangers was to create a DLO that showed what could potentially happen as a result of using drugs or alcohol. For this task, I worked with Alex and Jack, and we created a poster warning people about the dangers of drunk driving. On our DLO's we needed a strong message that would persuade people to think twice about driving drunk or using drugs. Our message was "Don't be like this guy, make a choice... Make the right choice..." We thought this was a strong message, and would work well.

Siri Group Challenge

Today, we have been given a challenge for writing by our teacher Mrs Anderson. Our challenge was to write in exactly 50 words, a response that Siri (An automated program on Apple devices) would give us if we asked it "Why Kokako Lodge is the greatest place to take year 7 and 8's on camp?" Although Mrs Anderson wanted to make this more of a challenge. So what we could do is gain points by using different Language features that would give us 5 points each. If every feature was used, then you could gain a total of 40 points. Although for another 5 points, you needed to make sure that everyone in your group was working together, and that a learning conversation was taking place. If you had exactly 50 words, and you used different references, you could even have 100 points total! Once you finished writing, you needed to digitally create a Siri conversation showing Siri's answer. The final step was to create a Screencastify that had us voicing over the whole conversation. For this activity, I worked with Julian, Jack, and Viliami. We had a lot of fun, and enjoyed recording the most.