For Reading this term so far, we have been doing activities related to the book we are listen as a class. This book is called Hatchet, written by Gary Paulsen, and is a survival story. One of the activities we had was to redesign the book cover. On the original cover of our teacher’s book, it had a silhouette of a bear, a sunset in the silhouette, and a shadow of a plane in the sunset. I recreated my design in a cartoon style on Canva. My design of the cover of the book Hatchet looks like this.

Do you think surviving in the wild is still an important skill and what are the reasons behind your answer?

For Religious Education this term, we have been working on the virtue of self-respect. Self-respect is when you take care of yourself by doing things like keeping good hygiene and, apparently from what my class teachers telling us, putting deodorant on. If you are putting deodorant on, I suggest making sure to put some on your feet. Feet are just as important as armpits, so never forget those stinky feet! For me, I caught a type of skin infection called Pitted Keratolysis, probably caused by a bacteria called Kytococcus sedentarius and sweaty feet. It made my feet smell like chou tofu (use Google if you are unsure).

Our task on this virtue of self-respect is to create goals using the template our teacher gave us. We had to put a picture of ourselves and add 2 learning goals plus 2 other goals. The instructions said at the end to make it pretty and creative. In conclusion, my outcome of my work appeared to be like this.

What do you do to show self-respect?

For maths lately, we have been learning the order of operations. The order of operations is the order for more than 1 operation in an equation. Our task is to teach others on what we learnt on the order of operations, using GEMA and/or BEDMAS. These abbreviations are explained in the slideshow I made using Canva. Hope you learnt something new from me.

Why do you think the order of operations are set like how it is set today?

For this blog post on the Autumn Learning Journey, I am sharing activity 17. This task is to create a digital poppy using Piskel, a site for making things in pixels.

Piskel link: piskelapp.com

I choose to do this activity because Anzac Day is coming up this week and I will be going to one of the RSA (Returned and Services Association) service on Anzac day with my St. John cadet this Thursday.

I used some simple lines and shapes to create the poppy, and adding some colours to it.  Here are the images of the poppies I created.

How do you commemorate Anzac Day?

For this term break, the Autumn Learning Journey occupies our spare time. The next activity I chose out of the 20 was activity 4: Minecraft challenge. This task’s instruction was to construct an Autumn themed build. However, the requirement was that there must be something “built” in that world. For this Autumn build, I used the Minecraft pumpkin as my main block. Then I placed 2 stained glass blocks at the top of the roof as skylight instead using torches inside. This skylight allows natural light to come into my otherwise 100% pumpkin made party house. It is a bit like that of Hansel and Gretel, but instead of cake and sugar, it’s pumpkin!

Inside the pumpkin party house, it has beds at the back of the room, all warm coloured, red, orange, and yellow. Then there is the carpet laid on the pumpkin floor, coloured same as the beds. Next there is the door, made of copper because I couldn’t find any door that directly relates to Autumn, but copper is like an Autumn colour initially until it tarnishes into green. This pumpkin party house, well known for it’s name, produces pumpkin foods, and hold a record breaking number of parties.

I found this task easy to do, but I would probably give it a rating of 3 out of 5 because I don’t really like Minecraft overall. It took me about 20 minutes to make it, but it took me more than 2 hours just to find out how to take a screenshot in Minecraft on my Windows desktop.

For this term break, we have the Autumn Learning Journey to entertain us. This time, I have decided to do activity 12 of the Autumn Learning Journey. For this task, I have created 4 math problems using things I could see. I got the idea of this kind of maths from school by doing Otago Maths. I enjoy solving these puzzles, so I chose to make a similar version of it to share with other people.

Do you prefer straight equations or more riddle-like maths, and why?
Happy Easter and hope you enjoy my challenge!

For this term break, the Autumn Learning Journey has appeared once again! As usual, there are 20 tasks to do, and our goal is to complete as much as we can, and once we complete these tasks, we have to put them on our blogs. For activity 11 of the Autumn Learning Journey this year, we have to do a boggle on the word Easter. A boggle is to find, from one’s perspective, as many words as possible out of another word. I found 51 words out of the word Easter, and after typing the words down, I decorated it on Canva. I have also put my words in alphabetical order, and I did this on a site called Text Fixer. Try it out, it really saved a lot of hassle!

Link: https://www.textfixer.com/tools/alphabetical-order.php

I figured out since it is Autumn, and the word is Easter, I made the decorations a bit of Easter and the rest Autumn. I really enjoyed this task as I do it quite often for fun, and for school work sometimes.

For writing, we have been doing a theme of mythological creatures. For this writing task, we had to make our own mythological creature and write about it. There was a minimum requirement set by our teacher of 3 paragraphs, and at the end, I ended up writing  6 paragraphs. I wrote more of a story on how my creature became what it is, and my creature is called…

Chickenstein! The Chickenstein’s story starts here.

Chickenstein

On a sunny day, I decided to have a cheese picnic. I found a moldy piece of cheese in the fridge, so I threw it out the window for the chickens to eat. Unfortunately, a baby chick, called Leg-peace, pecked at everything to try what it tasted like but was lactose intolerant.

A chicken with lactose intolerance is pretty rare, but due to smoke from a factory, Leg-peace was born 99.99% earlier than she was supposed to be. You see, what happened was her mother got a sickness from her previous owner working in a factory. Her owner brought her to the factory every day, and she wandered off. She snuck off curiously into a room of lung warming smoke. She laid an egg, which hatched a second after it was laid. Leg-peace came early to the world.

Leg-peace’s mother’s owner couldn’t keep the both of them, so they were given up free for adoption. I walked past the box containing them and thought it would be cool to adopt more chicken. They now live with me in the yard with my other pet chicken. If you are wondering how I know this information on Leg-peace and her mother, they came in a box with papers with their backstory.

Back in my backyard, Leg-peace ate a piece of that cheese, and due to lactose intolerance, she turned into a monster. She growled a noise that nobody can ever recognize and her white fluffy, silky feathers turned into unsmooth yeti fur with a murky algae colour. Her fur was a lot rougher than before, and her size was definitely more than ten times the size of her original self. Her wings are as humongous and strong as thunderstorm clouds and her newly grown teeth as sharp as the great white shark’s. She grew horns that seem like extra emergency teeth, but only much bigger. She had Big Foot’s feet, and her legs are just as powerful. Her face is the most bizarre thing to look at, and her breath is the smell of, need I say, the moldy cheese I threw out the window.

The other animals got away from this disastrous creature, including Leg-peace’s mother. Most of them flew, like natural birds. Weird thing is that our ducks and chickens supposedly cannot fly. Sad thing is that apart from my pet birds flying, even our pigs were. I had used the expression to a lot of people “When pigs fly”, but pigs were flying right now.

Leg-peace flew with them. She tried to catch up with her mother, but her mother flew like lightning. I called Leg-peace to me, and she dived. She looked at me, and I didn’t dare to look back. My heart raced and it was freaky. My mind whirred and there was a bomb about to land on me. I knew it was only my own pet. The most bizarre of all was her outlook. She landed on me like a nice warm blanket. Then she died because that was actually a severe allergic reaction. From that day on, people thought I was kidding and called this creature Chickenstien. The Chickenstein is now to this day widely known as a legendary mythological creature, haunting the streets of ice in winter time.

My mythological creature is more of a hybrid of a yeti and a flying chicken. As told in the story, it is really friendly otherwise I’d probably be eaten. What do you imagine for your mythological creature to look like and act like?

Today in the afternoon, we received Duffy books. These books are given to us for free by Duffy, supported by Avonhead Rotary and Scholastic. Near the start of this term, I needed to choose 4 books, ranking them in my favourite. Our first choice should be like “I really must have to get it” and second choice “I almost must have it”. Third and fourth choices are more like backups, but we still have to choose in case we don’t get our top two choices. Usually the top two choices we make are indeed the books we get. My top choices were a picture book called “Butt Out”

and a comic book called “Pizza and Taco: Super-Awesome Comic”. I didn’t get exactly both books though because apparently and unfortunately they ran out of the second title and were unable to get more stock. They replaced it with another title in the series for us called “Pizza and Taco: Too Cool for School”.

I am very grateful for these books I received, even though one of the books I chose didn’t come exactly as I picked, so I would like to say a thank you to Duffy, Avonhead Rotary, and Scholastic for suppling the enjoyment of reading for us. This is a picture of me reading happily, appreciating my replacement book, my “Pizza and Taco: Too Cool for School”.

How do you feel when receiving a book and what is the reason behind it?

For writing this week, we have been doing a theme of mythical creatures. We are watching this movie called The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, and it talks about this thing which gets released into the loch. This movie relates to the writing task because we had to describe what the Loch Ness monster is or what it looks like. We had to create a picture of what we were describing, and these are my work.

The creature

Meet the hybrid creature of a dragon, a fish, and a whale. A head of a dragon with a mouth that breathes water instead of flames. The tail and body of this creature comes from a whale, with its four finawings, a mixture of fin and wing, allowing it to swim fast through the water and fly out of the surface. Its gills come from the famous tiny fish, the goldfish. Its skin with scales was born from the toughest dragon that ever lived. Its life starts in an egg of metal. It is an amphibian meaning it lives on water and land. On land, it can fly and soar as high as the stars, and on water, it can dive as far as where obsidian blocks can be found. It’s like the size of the Titanic, and yet it is the most peaceful creature ever known. It feeds only on sand, and produces one of the rarest metal, rhodium, every day in the form of an egg. This creature is the Loch Ness monster. It can be a highly vulnerable pet, but the look scares all. The teeth, sharp as a shark’s set but never eats meat. It is friendly, but like I said, the look seems to prompt people to think that it is a threat.

What does the Loch Ness monster look like in your image or mind?