Year: 2023

Sadly last week I was sick and I couldn’t go to school. All I could do was stay at home and try to entertain myself. Now I’m going to share some ways to entertain yourself at home and I hope that you find it fun. 

Here’s a list of things to do! 

1. Cooking/baking, e.g: noodles, chocolate cookies.  
2. Arts and crafts, e.g: paper aeroplane, painting rocks/shells, origami. 
3.   Last and the best is to sleep when you’re sick. 

One of the things that I made while I was at home was a Christmas tree that was made out of pipe cleaners. 

Here’s the instruction on how to make it, and what you need:

You need:

• Hot glue gun and a hot glue stick
• 6 pipe cleaner (of the colour of the that you want the leaves to be)
• And small card rectangle (length 10 cm, width 5 cm)
• Some small beads
• One red pipe cleaner and one white pipe cleaner (for the candy cane) 
• Yellow or white pipe cleaner
• String (if you want to make it into a key-chain or an ornament on the Christmas tree) 

Steps: 

First grab the rectangle card and use the length to fold it into a 3D cone. It will look like a small traffic cone. Make sure to leave a little hole at the top. After that you will need to use the hot glue gun to glue the two sides together. (Make sure that you have unplugged the hot glue gun!!) Next you will need to flip the cone upside down and cut the extra pieces of paper on the bottom to make it flat. 

Now we will need to prepare the Christmas tree leaves! Take the pipe cleaner, start bending them in the shape of v’s, the length would be like the same length of the one dollar coin. Do it till the pipe cleaner ends, and do that to all of the other 6 of them. 

 

For the last few weeks we’ve been learning about how to take good photos.  Sometimes the object that you walk past everyday might make an amazing cool photo that you never thought you could take! I reckon that photography is a subject where you try out many new things.  

 

Some things that I learnt that can make an excellent photo are the colour. The colour on a photo is really important, because if your object is on a background that’s the same colour as the thing then it won’t be very noticeable. Another could be lighting, because if you make your object facing the sun/light then it will make the object pop out. Here’s a tip: always focus on your object so it won’t be blurry in a busy background, and so it’s the main subject on the photo.  

 

The photos down there are the best photos that I took. I reckon what makes it look amazing is because I took it close up so you can see the pattern, texture. I edited the photo so the leaf does not blend in with the wood. The way I positioned the leaf in the middle so it fills up the whole screen. 

Last week Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Te Maunga went to camp at Coopers Beach Christian Camp. At the start I was excited and a little bit nervous, because it was my first time. I had so much fun in camp that I forgot I had been nervous. Some of the activities that we did were: slippery hockey, rolling down the big hill, kayaking, roasting marshmallows by the fire pit, and the 80 metre long water slide. My number one favourite activity has to be the kayaks because it was relaxing and calming. 

 

One thing I learnt at camp was to try new food, other than my traditional chinese food. I was ok with them, some were nice and some were not my favourite because it was my first time trying it (so I wasn’t really used to it). Another thing that I’ve learnt on camp is how to kayak, because I’ve never kayaked before in my life. 

 

One thing I could do better next time is possibly have a try by myself on the kayaks. The reason is because I want to see how much I’ve learnt from an expert. Which activity would you try out first?

 

 

In week one we learnt about the Fijian language, we had Litia (my classmate) to teach us about her wonderful culture. She told us some basic Fijian words like: kerekere=please, vinaka-thank you, gunu=drink. Litia also brought some 

traditional fijian handicrafts. 

One thing I learnt was: E ruasagavulukatolu na matanivola ena vosa vakaviti. (There are 23 letters in the Fijian alphabet)  

The hardest part about learning the Fijian language was how to pronounce the words.

For the last 2 weeks we read this text ‘Living by the Maramataka’ and we learned lots of things about maramataka from it. The maramataka is also known as the Maori calendar. We had to answer some questions about the text, and write our own questions. One thing about the maramataka is that it is really useful, because it tells you the best times to: do gardening and fishing. Another thing about the Maramataka is that it shows us when there is a full moon. 

One thing I learnt from it was how ancestors made the first maramataka, they observed the plants and the animal world and they linked these changes and movement of the sun, the stars, the plants and the moon to see the best time to do each thing. 

The hardest part that I found was the last activity, where we had to write what our family does in each season and I got stuck on the question: what does my family do in autumn? At the end I still found something, which was bush walks. 

What does your family do in each season? 

Here’s mine:

For the last 3 months I’ve been away on holiday in China. The day before I went I was so excited, because it’s been 4 years since I’ve gone back. Everything was very unusual when I first went there, because everyone around me was speaking Chinese and the buildings around me were huge. 

 

The best part was the time I went to the zoo with my cousins. We saw lots of different kinds of animals like: pandas, many tigers, fishes, elephants, and different types of monkeys. The best was pandas, because it was my first time meeting pandas. The pandas were so shy, hiding behind the tree the whole time. 

 

Other times while I was in China, I had some Chinese lessons. Now I know how to write composition in Chinese and many more. The next time I go back I must go on a ride on the roller coaster in the zoo. Where do you recommend I should go next time in China? 

 

Yesterday we did a taskmaster challenge, in our class taskmaster challenges are mostly teamwork challenges. This challenge is about communication with people. The challenge that we did was copy the picture, we are in groups of 3. In our teams we have 10 minutes to copy a picture, there are 2 the same exact pictures stuck outside the walls just a few steps away. You need the square papers or normal type, you need the same coloring pencils if needed in the picture. 

In the teams we have one person that’s drawing and the rest are walkers. The drawer can not go outside or move, they can only draw the picture. The walkers get turns to go outside and look at the picture. When one comes back the other goes if they want, and the others guide the drawer on what to draw. 

Here are the rules: 

• The walkers can not run.
• You can switch walkers, but they can not go at the sametime. 
• The walkers can not touch the papers. 

 

We did this challenge a week ago and we did it again yesterday. On the first time that I did this challenge I was a draw. Second time that we did it I was a walker, so I got to feel how a walker feels and a drawer.

What I found challenging as a drawer was, when the walkers would start rushing you when you have no idea what we’re supposed to draw. I found it really hard because the walkers would just repeatedly tell you the same thing, but they do not explain it specific enough. The second time I got to be a walker. our teams did the opposite of the walkers rushing the drawers, but the drawer rushing the walkers to go outside. 

 

What I think about what we learnt about communication could be when we get angry when someone is rushing or information overload. We need to use our Kaha to stay strong and tell them to calm down and slow down. If we are the ones that are not respecting them, we need to use our Manaakitanga and respect them with kind words. If we are annoyed and frustrated, we need to use our Tu maia hoe of not giving up and keep going. If we just give up that means you are letting your team down and lose.  

What I probably mostly enjoyed was looking at other groups drawing results. I would be shocked by how much they can do in a short amount of time.

 

Last week on Friday we had our Paihia School Water PAL Day. Everyone was very excited to have the water day, because the water day was raining so it was postponed to last week Friday. We had some very fun water activities, for e.g: duck duck gose, red light green light, water hockey… Too bad I couldn’t join the water PAl Day, so I just followed my group around.

 

My favorite activity that seems to be fun is red light green light. How to play red light green light is how to play it normally, but when you move you get sprayed with water and you have to start again. The seniors have to start further behind the start line.

 

One thing that I hope that could happen next time is getting to join the PAL day, and I could have brought my water bottle with me while walking around.

Last week we were learning about coding, we animated our names. We had some sheets of paper that had some instructions on how to code some different special abilities on your letters. Some were how to change your letters color when you click it, how to make your letters glide around.

One thing I learnt was you could really learn some cool abilities just by playing around sometimes. Another thing is some abilities are really easy to do like for example for the changing color. First you need to choose a letter from the sprite page, and make sure to add a background. After that you’ve chosen the letters you’ll need to go to the code page, go to the events part and add the code “when this sprite is clicked”. Next you need to go to the looks part and add the code “change color effect by 25”.

One thing I could do better next time could be adding some more features, or having the cool features coded instead of the ones that are easy. One of the cool features that I’ve added to my name animation was, when you click space the background changes color.

Last week we were learning to introduce our whanau in Te Reo Maori. We had to say who our parents were and our grandparents on both sides of our family. Who were your siblings, and who were the oldest and the youngest in the family. In the process we had to make a slideshow, or we could use prezi to show our family with pictures or avatars that we made of our family.

One thing I learnt was how to introduce my brother in Te Reo Maori. How you do it is you have to say tungane, if you are a girl and you have a brother, you say tuahine if you are a boy and you have a sister. Another thing that I’ve learnt was that it doesn’t matter if some of my family members didn’t have an English name because when we say it in our pepeha we don’t have to write it or anything, we just have to say it.

One thing I could do better next time is make the avatars the night before I did the presentation on prezi, because after I typed everything I needed to put in the avatars, but at that time didn’t I have avatars of my family because at the start I didn’t want to waste my time on making the avatars. At the end I just quickly screened shot all the characters that we could use at the start if we didn’t want to make avatars or we didn’t have time anymore.