Week 3: Today, just now, I did Winter sports and for winter sports we did cricket. We started with throwing the ball to each other and trying to get as far as possible. Every time we caught the ball, we took a step back but if we dropped the ball, we had to restart. After that, we did different variations of cricket until the end of the day (or now).

Week 4: What a fun day this afternoon! We did korfball this week in the wonderful rain. At first, it was cloudy but nice for Winter Sports, but then it started raining in the middle of the session. We carried on while the rain slowly got heavier and heavier. Apart from that, it was pretty fun shooting lots of hoops.

Week 5: It was an awesome session today! I loved this afternoon’s game of korfball in the nice weather that is not the rain. The fact that we weren’t wet made it a lot more fun. I had so much fun that I got so hot and took off my tracksuit. We scored lots of goals but also made lots of silly mistakes, such as throwing badly and getting intercepted. Other times, we intercepted and scored the goal! Next week, we will be doing a new sport. What do you think the sport will be?

For the last few weeks, we have been learning about poems. We looked at lots of different poems written by a range of poets from across the world. Recently, we looked at the poem Rain by Hone Tuwhare, a Māori New Zealand poet. His style of free verse writing includes four lines per stanza and at least one sense in each stanza. He writes five or more stanzas in the poem and covers all the senses throughout the whole poem.

After learning about him and his poem Rain, we had to choose a topic and write like him. Using his free verse style as inspiration, I chose to write my poem about Parakiore, the new sport and recreation centre in Christchurch. First, I brainstormed what things in Parakiore matched the senses. After writing it into a poem, I turned it into a Google Vids with a recorded voice over. This is my poem that I created on Google Vids about Parakiore. I quite enjoyed this task because it wasn’t too challenging.

What do you think about Parakiore Sport and Recreation Centre after seeing my poem?

This morning, I travelled all the way from Christchurch to Rolleston just to look at a quarry site in working progress. I was greeted with a warm welcome from Mr. Jury and his team at the Wheatsheaf site. He gave a quick introduction about quarries like this quarry which is very different from Halswell Quarry, which is now a park. One of his colleague, Sam, gave us a tour and drove us around the whole site. I asked lots of questions that keep popping up in my mind as we got to see lots of different things, such as different piles of aggregate, types of machinery and materials. Sam managed to fill my brain with knowledge, answering every question I had.

After the tour, I learnt a bit more from Mr. Jury and Sam, who illustrated using 3D models of quarries made with artificial intelligence from aerial photos taken by drones. They also explained that quarries would be polluting the environment if done incorrectly. At Wheatsheaf, they use water sprinkled around the site to control the dust from flying everywhere. They also use berms to control light and sound pollution that would affect neighbours. To help the environment even more, they take what they need and return that item better than when they first got it, like water. They said that the water is safe to drink after their water treatment process.

After a whole day of fun learning, I had to head back to school.
Here are some photos of my trip.

What do you find most interesting about quarrying?

Today, just now, we finished Winter Sports this week. Every week, on a Friday afternoon, we play a sport until the end of the day. It goes through the winter season, playing sports such as touch, netball and capture the flag. For my Winter Sport, I choose the multi sport option. We get a different sport every second week, trying out cool sports for free. This is the second week of volleyball and the last week of our first sport. It was really fun learning skills and rules of volleyball.

This week, we have been researching and doing tasks about ANZAC day, World War 1 (WWI), and things related to it. ANZAC stands for Australia New Zealand Army Corps. We have been looking into the book called ANZAC Ted and the poem called Flanders Fields. Today, to remember ANZAC a little bit more, we searched up a person we chose from rows of white cross.

For the first days or so of this week, we boosted our learning of ANZAC with the story of ANZAC Ted. It’s a beautiful story of how a teddy bear was a mascot of New Zealand and came back in a torn appearance. I think this representation is really cool because if a teddy bear is torn on the outside, humans could have been torn on the inside.

Later on, we moved to the poem Flanders Fields, where the poppies grew. We had to read the poem fluently, and do lots of tasks related to that poem. Finally, we carried on the poppy theme, and had to write about poppies. The main points for our poppy writing were the colours and meanings of those poppies. After writing pure words, we turned the boring black and white text into a whole video with music, elements, and voiceovers.

Which poppy do you choose to wear in remembrance of the soldiers?

Last Friday afternoon, the older children of our school had to run lots of loops. Depending on age, we ran a range of 1 kilometre to 3 kilometres for the Cross Country trials. It would be my last Cross Country ever with this school, having to run 3 big loops.

Being the oldest girls in the school, we had to run our set of laps first. Next came the Year 8 boys combined with the only two Year 7 boys. Following behind were the Year 5 girls and boys, Year 4 girls and boys, Year 7 girls and boys and finally, Year 6 girls and boys. Top 3 of each race would soon go to Zones, usually happening soon at the domain next to Queenspark School.

I am so excited to compete in my next race at my friends’ school! I finished 1st, meaning I get to have a fun day with two other friends from my school and quite a few friends from other schools, competing against me. Zones is really a fun day, having a whole day outdoors.

I enjoy Cross Country because it means I get to have a nice run outdoors, instead of being stuck in class all the time. Being outdoors and running, I loved my race in the warm sun and cool breeze. In one of my laps, I even tried to sprint against someone on an electric scooter, but I unsuccessfully ran out of breath. The scooter felt as fast as a slow trotting horse, which is quite fast for me!

Here are some photos of my friends and I.

How do you like to spend your time outdoors?

For this amazing term, we have a cool program called Dancing like the Stars. It is when we train to perform skills that we learnt with an instructor with some music or a song. This year, we have a very different but special dance routine. Instead of just normal dancing like most other schools in most other years, we get to do circus as our performance! That also means a lot of skills, balance, control and training.

We only just started our first practices on Monday and Tuesday. Our first session was on Monday after lunch, walking all the way to the circus hall. To boost off some basic but important circus skills, we did lots of counterweight activities. Counterweight activities are when one shares their weight with another person, meaning safety and balance is very important here. Some examples of the counterweight that we did on the first day was a pyramid, consisting of 6 people. We got told that there may be more fun and complicated tricks later.

On Tuesday, we tested our skills whether we would best fit in hula hooping, diabolo, or poi. We split into smaller groups so that everyone had a turn at having things a go. I did the poi first, which was spinning and doing tricks with a piece of rope, a heavy pouch, and a coloured tail. Next for me was the diabolo, a piece of string attached to 2 sticks to keep spinning like a yoyo. Last was my favourite which was the hula hoops. I think I did best in hula hoops and I managed to pull off some simple tricks.

Our class goal is to be able to perform such cool acts for our final performance. There will hopefully be acrobatics and fun counterweight tricks, hula hooping, poi, and diabolos. I am looking forward to learning more complex tricks for our final acts with our fantastic instructors!

What suggestion would you add to our acts so that the outcome is the best?

Today, I completed the task on the Autumn Learning Journey about Autumn and music. What do you get when you cross the season of Fall and Song Maker? This task, where I made a song that reminded me of Autumn!

The first idea of Autumn that sprinted to my mind was the start of the movie Frozen II, where Anna and Olaf sings a song in an Autumn scene. A word that was part of the song is Autumn and Olaf held a leaf for most of the song. I tried recreating part of the song on Song Maker as my song that reminded me of Autumn. Give filling your house of Autumn with your custom music!  musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker/

What is your favourite seasonal song from a movie?

Today, I celebrated Autumn with a tasty style. One of the tasks in the Autumn Learning Journey is to spoil my parent with some good food with an Autumn theme. I made some 煎豆沙湯圆 (jeen dou sha tong yuen) or Pan-fried Sweet Red Bean Cream Paste Glutinous Rice Dumpling Balls for my dad as breakfast.

To begin, I prepared the red bean paste yesterday. First, I put the red beans into the rice cooker with some water. I turned on the rice cooker and waited for that to cook. Once the red beans were finished cooking in the rice cooker, I sieved them so that I only had the finest cream paste. It was a lot of work compressing that through the sieve. I smoothed it out in a container and placed it in the fridge.

Next, in the morning, I took out the chilled paste and made the glutinous rice dough. To make this dough, I used glutinous rice flour and drinking water. Then, after making this dough, I rolled it out into portions. I turned the portions into balls and one by one flattened them to add the filling. When I finished the filling, I closed it up and rolled it back into balls to fry. I enjoyed making my baby ones.

After I fried then and finished cooking them, I placed it on a plate and handed it to my dad who was still in bed. I spoilt him by letting him stay in bed and eat his breakfast with me. The feedback on my cooking was delicious!

What Autumn themed treat would you love to be spoilt with and how would you like to be spoilt?

Today is officially the first day of the Autumn term break, with the Autumn Learning Journey back for fun! Again, like most other seasonal learning journeys, there are 20 cool activities to kill boredom. To start off my boredom busting, I chose to do something relatively easy.

This task was to create a poppy on Piskel, a platform for pixel art. Have a go looking at the site! piskelapp.com
I made a few versions of a poppy on it. First, I made a poppy with five petals, but I realised that poppies only have four! I made another one using Google images as an inspiration and a reminder of what poppies looked like. Then I made one more after seeing a Minecraft poppy pop up. These are my poppies.

Poppy 1:

Poppy 2 – ANZAC Poppy:

Poppy 3 – Minecraft Poppy:

How do you like to create your poppies?