Gingerbread City!

We have been learning all about fairytales. One of our favourite fairytales is Hansel and Gretel. As you probably know, in Hansel and Gretel, the witch lives in a house made of Gingerbread. We decided to make our own Gingerbread Houses as part of our Topic learning. We turned this idea into a mini-inquiry project. In groups, we had to find a recipe for gingerbread houses that we thought would be the best. 

We had to compare recipes and identify the one we thought would be the most simple and create the best gingerbread houses. We then had to create a shopping list, with all our ingredients and make a budget for our group. Next, we had to practise our phone conversation skills, as we rang several companies to ask them to donate ingredients to keep our costs as low as possible. We were so excited to be donated 4 dozen eggs from Farmer Brown and 20kgs of flour from Western Milling!  We began the creation process – in our groups, we had to follow our chosen recipe and create our gingerbread. We all did a great job of following the recipes and the class smelled delicious all day! The problems we faced were that we had underestimated how much gingerbread would be needed for each house and we ran out of butter, so we couldn’t make enough for every person. Luckily, Mrs Davies was able to work with the people who didn’t get their gingerbread and make some more with them. The second problem we faced was that it all took a lot longer than we expected. We got the gingerbread made really quickly, but the rolling of the gingerbread and cutting out of the templates took way too long. We took home our Gingerbread to cook over the weekend (we only have one oven at school, so couldn't cook them all here!), then brought them back. We then stuck them together with royal icing, then decorated them with lollies! 

We had an amazing time and we were SO proud of our creations! As well as being a great fairytale inquiry project, it will also be a stunning centre piece for our tables at Christmas time! Did you know that in America and Canada, it is a tradition to make a gingerbread house every year for Christmas? Maybe we could start this tradition in New Zealand too!

Wow! Room 6 has some talented students!

While we always knew that we were a clever bunch of kids in Room 6, we have learnt that some of us have amazing talents that are not related to learning too! Have a look at this awesome video - those are some brilliant yoyo skills! Have you ever tried using a yoyo? It is way harder than this video makes it look!

Around the World

Since the Rugby World Cup is being held in New Zealand at the moment, each child in Room 6 had adopted their own country!

We are researching our country and we will create a book to share our information. We will find out about our country's culture, history, national anthem, native wildlife, flag, location and other interesting facts. We are also finding out about Rugby and Rugby players in our adopted nation - did you know that Namibia has one player who has only ever played 3 games of Rugby in his life? And two of those games were in the 2011 World Cup!

We recreated our country's flag using crayon and dye. We think they look great - do you?

While we are interested in our adopted country and hope they do well in the World Cup, we are all Kiwi kids and want New Zealand to win! 

GO THE ALL BLACKS!!!!! :) 

We WON!!!

We won the challenge to beat Miss Williams to learn the V speech! After only 12 hours, one of our amazing girls had memorised the whole thing, but Miss Williams had only memorised the first 3 sentences. She says that it only took 30 minutes to learn. That's incredible! Here is the recording of the speech - what do you think?

Amazing Alliteration

We found this wonderful piece of alliteration and wanted to share it! It comes from a movie about Guy Fawkes and this is his introductory speech, explaining why he wanted to overthrow the government. Our challenge is to learn it before Miss Williams can learn it! We got into groups to translate this beautiful language into modern English. It was hard, but a lot of fun!

"Voila! In view humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the "vox populi" now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin, van guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose." We have provided our translation. Are we right, or did we get some things wrong? "Here I am, in your sight, a modest but experienced performer, forced to be both the wronged and the bad guy by the unpredictable nature of fate. My image, not just a self absorbed illusion, is all that is left of the voice of the people. However, I will be courageous and stand up against the leaders of this country who rule in a cruel and greedy way. My only option is to pick a fight with them, I vow to fight so that the good people of the world will one day rule it. Certainly, the soup of difficult words I have used to describe my mission was unnecessary!" Keep an eye out for our own alliteration stories!

Surface Features in Writing

In Room 6 we have been learning about using Surface Features correctly in our writing. We wrote this as a class to help us remember what each of the features are and what they mean. 

Surface Features are the features in writing that you notice straight away. Surface Features are the same in every type of writing, while Deep Features are different depending on the genre. Surface Features are Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling.

Grammar is making sure you are using the English language correctly. When you check your work for Grammar mistakes, make sure the sentence makes sense, that there are no words missing and that words are used correctly.

Punctuation is using the symbols associated with writing accurately. A comma is used to separate ideas that are still connected. A full stop is used to show the end of a sentence. Some other types of common punctuation are speech marks, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation marks, brackets, colons, and a lot more!

Spelling is putting the letters together accurately to make words. Correct spelling is important to make sure that your audience can understand what you are trying to say.

Surface Features are really important to get right, as it makes it very hard to read something with surface mistakes. We are going to work hard to correct our Surface Features in our writing.

Alien Invasion!

In Maths, we have been learning about geometry.

We had a look at some crop circles as amazing examples of using geometry to create art. We looked at the patterns, the symmetry and the use of geometric shapes. Here are some of the amazing examples we looked at:

 

We talked about how crop circles could have been made so symmetrically. We ruled out the alien option (although you never know!) and came up with the idea that maybe they used ropes to make the shapes so perfect.

We had a try at making circles with one person standing in the middle, holding a skipping rope and one person walking around the perimetre with a piece of chalk. It was harder than we thought, although we think that with practise we could get pretty good at it!

After that, we tried creating different geometric shapes using ropes and chalk. Some were easier than others.

We then created our own crop circles on the netball court - we wonder if the rest of the school will think aliens have landed at Sunnyhills!?