Virtual Art Gallery: A Toroa Inquiry *Term 2, 2020*

Kia ora whanau and the Marshland community,

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdown and reflecting on how Coronavirus has affected the world, Toroa students looked at what other global issues affect us too.

Some things we researched were:
What are Global Issues? (How) Do they affect us?
How can art spread a message?
What artists use their art to send a message?
How can we send a message about something we are passionate about?

Some topics that the students researched were; inequalities, inequity, poverty, the gender gap, pollution, environmental damage, mental health, racism, war.

The students created artwork to show these issues.

Take a look at our Virtual Gallery.  Leave your comments in the section below. What was your favourite piece?

Click here for the virtual Gallery

Last week of distance learning and it's been an impressive one

Hey Bloggers

It has been a great week, not only because the teachers are amazing and have given us heaps of great work, but because Level two is imminent. We are back at school on Monday, Hooray.

So this week.

Literacy. We have been reading Going Solo by Roald Dahl. It tells his story from where Boy (Roald Dahl's childhood stories) left off.

He then went to Africa to work for The Shell Company and he has many adventures there. Some of these are really funny, they involve animals and lots of the native people.
He then joined the RAF to fly in WW2.  At one point he delivered a secret package to a mystery man. We never find out what the package was, or who Cater was, who collected the parcel. We wrote a story imagining what happened with the package.

Here is Billy's story.

Going Solo is a great novel that I would recommend you read. What do you think of Billy's writing?

In maths we have been learning about global positioning coordinates, bearings and using a compass.We looked were the Natural and Modern Wonders of the World are, and then created a Seven Wonders of New Zealand.

Outstanding Adobe Spark of The Seven Wonders of Nz by Bella click on the link

Have you ever read any of Roald Dahl's biographies? What were your favourite stories?
If you could choose some of the Wonders of New Zealand, where would they be?

Stay safe peeps.

Roald Dahl: The Brave Survivor

In literacy we have been reading Going Solo by Roald Dahl.

It tells his story from where Boy left off. He went to Africa to work for The Shell Company and he has many adventures there. Some of these are really funny. 

He then joined the RAF to fly in WW2. We have recreated a part of the story where his plane crashes in the desert.

He manages to survive although he is blinded by the crash and badly injured. He does get his sight back eventually.

 Going Solo is a great novel that I would recommend you read.
 

Did you know Roald Dahl had written his biography for children to read? What was your favourite part of his story?

Parts of a circle animation

Hey bloggers!

This distance learning thing is awesome, my teachers make these wicked videos to teach us new stuff, and then we have to create something to show we understand.

Today I have learned about the parts of a circle. Did you know there was more than just circumference, diameter and radius?! Check out my animation to learn more.




I have not finished it all, as this is just modelling for my students!

Mrs D :o)

Learn about mean, median and mode with Scratch

Kia Ora Bloggers!

We have been learning about mean, median and mode. As a way of showing our learning, we have created a Scratch programme.
Scratch is a coding programme and teaching a lot of computational thinking skills.
To code, we need to learn have inputs, output, sequence, selection, iteration and storage. There is some problem solving and debugging that we need to do too, because there may be errors that stop the code from working properly. I found quite a few ‘bugs’ in mine, but it was great to work it out and really satisfying to make it run. Here it is, I hope you enjoy it and learn something.



Do you know how to code? What programmes do you use?
Let me know if you find any bugs!

Clever Counting!

Hi bloggers,

We are learning Samoan every Wednesday and over the last two weeks we have been learning how to count to ten.  I found this quite easy as it is very similar to counting to 10 in Maori.  Today we used Scratch to code a programme that would show people how to count to ten in Samoan.  Check it out!  Can you count to 10 in any other language?

This is just to say...

Kia ora Bloggers,

We are involved in the Get NZ writing and we are writing poems based on William Carlos William's poem This is just to say.

Have you done anything naughty? Be honest!

See you next time Bloggers.

Perfect Portrait

Kia ora Bloggers!

It's that time of year where teachers make us draw portraits! Arrgghhhh, I am terrible at drawing but maybe because this year it is more abstract it won't be so bad.

It's also about my interests, my culture so that people can learn a bit about me.
Here it is...

As you can see, I have a dog, she is called Mika and is a Springer Spaniel. I have a family, I have 2 children. I like going to the gym and going skiing.
My family is from Russia, Scotland and the UK. I have included the Silver Fern as I live in NZ.

The artist that this portrait style is based upon is Romero Britto, have you heard of him or seen any of his art work? They are really bright and fun.

See you again.

Beautiful Bar Graphs

Kia ora Bloggers!
Welcome back to the new year and my first blog post. I hope you all had a great summer break, personally I am not ready for summer to leave, and the autumn leaves to fall...I love the sun!

So, maths.
It seems simple, but drawing a bar graphs was surprisingly difficult. I had forgotten, or maybe I never knew, how to draw a proper bar graph.

Here is my first attempt.

I know right, not great. I had forgotten so many things, but I did label my axis!

So I now have a checklist;

• Scale starting at 0 and going up equally
• Gaps between the bars, even the y axis
• Labelling my axis
• A detailed title
• The frequency numbers on the lines, not in the squares 
• Use a ruler

I tried again and BOOM! my second attempt is so much better!

What do you think? So . much better, eh! 

Have you started your math programme yet? What are you learning? 

See you next time.