Our week in review

Well it's the end of our first week back at school. It feels like we have been back for ages, and we have been so busy learning about The Treaty of Waitangi and reviewing math strategies from last year that it has taken us all week to write our next post. We are very excited to see that we are getting lots of page views already. Thank-You to those people who commented on our last post - it is good incentive to write more.

The first day of this week was a Tuesday. We learnt about what New Zealand was like in the 1930's and what led to the Treaty. We watched some videos, had a class discussion, and then wrote all our ideas down. We learnt that there was lots of reasons that the Treaty was created, but we were particularly interested to know that some people were worried about French people coming to New Zealand and taking over.

On Wednesday we rewrote the Treaty in our own words to make it easier to understand. We were each paired up and given a paragraph to rewrite. It was challenging because we had to figure out what all the hard words were and turn it into language that we could understand.  In the afternoon went outside and used chalk to represent the changes that the 1865 and 1873 Land Acts had on Maori land. Lots of us found this a good way to help us learn because we could immerse ourselves in what would have actually happened in that time.

On Thursday the year 7 and 8's went to technology at Taumarunui High School. The year 8's did cooking and made cupcakes. The year 7's did metal work and created a wind thermometer. At the end we were waiting for our ride back to school - it never showed up! We were stuck in town for at least an hour until we rang the school and they came to get us.

While the big kids were at tech the year fives signed up to an online computer program called "ReadTheory". At the start we did a pre-test to see what stage we were at, and then we were given texts to read according to our results. It was exciting. Some of us enjoyed it so much we went home and showed our parents! We are moving up the levels fast!

In other news, today some of us learnt that Albert Einstein's theory of gravitational waves that distort length and time has been proven to be true. We also know that two black holes have joined together to make one massive black hole!! Interesting huh!! One of our year 8 boys is going to keep our class updated on this as he is a bit of a galaxy guru.

We better finish up here as we have got to practice soccer for the twilight soccer tournament coming up. Next week we will have to remind our teacher to take photos during the week that we can add to our posts!