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).

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?

During weeks 6 & 7 at school this term, we went down to QEII for our annual school swimming lessons. We go down for a 25 minute lesson each day, and learn about the different styles of swimming, safety rules, and so much more. The first thing we got taught when we arrive each day is a safety message involving water.

Then, on the first day, we got tested on our skill to be split into three groups. All we have to to for the test is to swim freestyle. The instructors put me in the advanced group. The instructor my group got was a cool kid once from our school.

For the first week of lessons, we did a lot of swimming. We started off doing one lap at a time, soon developing into two laps at a time. I went first, finishing near the end and slightly out of breath with lots of fun. Although I finished my laps early, I enjoyed chasing the tail.

Lots of the laps were freestyle, the most common and fastest stroke of all. This gave me the opportunity to speed up and practice for Zones swimming sports. Apart from freestyle, we also did a lot of backstroke and breaststroke. I got given quite a few butterfly laps while the others could choose between butterfly or something easier.

Towards the end of the lessons, we did some sculling and treading water for a bit of time. We did some survival backstroke as well. I liked it, but I would prefer having a bit more competition and challenge.

The last 3 days of swimming were the inflatable boat and the emergency equipment. One group got to go onto the boat and the other had to save people with the emergency equipment. We swapped over the next day.

I had to miss a day of the school lessons to go all the way to Jellie Park. I competed Zones for swimming, representing my school that day. I didn’t do too well, but at least I got to see all my friends from other schools and I got through to Canterbury Swimming Sports, where I compete amongst all the best swimmers in schools all across Canterbury.

The final day was swimming in pajamas. It was just like every other year, but I tried hacking the system this year by swimming underwater for the whole path recreating the river flow current against me. Unfortunately, I got caught and I had to redo it multiple time, but I still held my breath each and everytime. It was a fun and lovely, relaxing final experience.

Where is your favourite swimming facility?

Today, I am sharing my reflection on Religious Education (R.E.) this term. We have learnt about our bishop, Michael, the season of Lent, and the Annunciation of Mary. We also learnt about Sin, but I wasn’t in class when we learnt about that. I did whatever was put online on our class site and I learnt it through the slideshow.

We learnt about out bishop Michael by reading an article about him. We had to find some fun facts from that page and make an interesting question to ask him. We did this in our R.E. book.

We learnt about the season of Lent and how we prepare ourselves for Easter. We also did some works in our R.E. book on the same day we learnt about bishop Michael. Our new teacher is quite cool.

We learnt about the Annunciation of Mary on the day that we celebrate the Annunciation of Mary. We watched the video about the story of Angel Gabrielle telling Mary that she would have a baby. We looked in the bible about some part of it before we watch the video. At the end of that lesson, we answered some questions in our R.E. book related to that story.

I was given a slideshow all about sin. I learnt that there are three main type of sin. Original Sin, Personal Sin, and Social Sin.
Original Sin came from Adam and Eve when they committed a crime against God by eating the fruit they were told not to eat. Most people have Original Sin, but Mary and Jesus never had sin.
Personal Sin is when one chooses to sin and hurt themselves, and to sin against everyone.
Social Sin is when unfairness or injustice becomes part of society, such as discrimination, exclusion, or racism.

What do you know about sin?