Today, our digital tech teacher taught us about a cool site called Google Meet. It is an app to gather a team of people and have a nice chat, catch up, or conference. Google Meet has a lot of awesome functions to make life easier, like buttons to communicate without having everyone talking at once. Examples of these buttons are the emojis where one can react to a piece of information shared on the spot. Another one is the hand raising button, so that one can speak when everyone is muted and not speaking over another by accident. These things can be good especially if one’s team lives far away, is spread around the world, or if the meeting happens during a time of quarantine, lockdown, etc.

I think this is a very cool thing to have access to because it also means less hustle, work and it’s not as costly as going places. The only thing required to host or join a Google Meet is a Google account and a join code/link. This makes Google Meet a very practical tool that is easy to use.

I did a matching task to match the words with the pictures about Google Meet etiquette. We learnt about the etiquette of Google Meet, and in case you may not know, etiquette is like manners. This is my completed work.

How do you communicate in the digital world and what etiquette do you have?

Yesterday, we had to present to the cute year 3s our Matariki presentation we had been working on for the whole week. First, we were in our groups, being paired with the little children assigned to us. My group included me (as the host), 2 girls and 2 boys. I was very lucky to have a fun and entertained group who listened very carefully to my presentation. First, I ran through my slideshow that I planned, letting my children look at the Matariki book I had. Then, I played a little song naming the stars of Matariki before finishing with a fun Blooket I made. This is my presentation that I made and showed.

What does Matariki mean to you?

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?

Week 6: This afternoon, our new sport was… well, different Māori games. We started with a warm up game that meant fast movement or agility. The aim of the game was to say “he” if both people did the same action with their legs, but if someone said “he” when both people are not the same, then the other person gets the point. Next, to warm up our upper body, our feet were stuck to the ground and the game was basically a game of shoulder tag. Then, we played another game with a poi toa until the end of the session. This game was a bit like netball, but without piviting and only catching by the rope. I enjoyed this session and I made lots of new friends.

Week 7: The awesome season of winter sports has officially ended for this year! The last day of term 2 finally finishes with the spectacular fun from the cool Māori games, including a few from last week, some more this week, and a couple of combos. It was awesome to finish my season with the game with some poi, a game with the ball but one can only catch/pick up/throw with a flat hand, and some games of running. What did you do this winter?

Last night, most of the intermediates of my school travelled all the way to Parakiore Recreation and Sports Centre in the middle of Christchurch just to shine like a star. We have been practising all term long for the Dancing like the Stars programme and yesterday evening was the special moment to be the star. Our performance was different. Most people from other schools just… dance, but our school? We perform tricks with diabolos, ribbons and hula hoops. We rehearsed many times as circus lessons. We were blessed with such cool knowledge, equipment, and awesome instructors. We got t-shirts, representing the programme and our school. I thought we did fantastic, having a whole term’s worth of hard work paid off. I loved learning how to do the diabolo and having a go at trying the ribbons and diabolo near the start of the term. Unfortunately, I was unable to make it to the performance and so I didn’t get to finish learning all the tricks.

What do you think you would rate our performance from 1 (worst) to 10 (best)?

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?