Bits and Bobs

As the term draws to a close I thought I should share a bit of what we've been up to recently.

The class are going full steam ahead with their Science Fair investigations and entries. There are some fabulous topics under investigation - do homemade fire starters work better than store bought ones, which washing powder gets your clothes the cleanest, which battery gives you the most bang for your buck - just to name a few.

We are also busy creating some works of art that could potentially end up on the Toko Hall wall. Each child has taken a photo of rural life and then printed and enlarged it. They have then made a grid and on an A2 piece of paper drawn another grid. This is to help them transfer their photo into a scale sketch before turning it into a painting.

All Year 5 - 8 children are participating in this art activity. The Toko Hall Committee will then judge the pieces and select their favourite ones to be placed on the outside of the hall. 

We are also flat out writing debates at the moment. Our topic for the cluster debate at Pembroke is: Children should be allowed to climb trees at school.   Students are working in teams to plan their debate. On Friday we will be sharing the debates at school and from those debates we will pick our Year 7 team and our Year 8 team to represent Toko next Wednesday. 

As well as having Jones Cup yesterday, we are involved in a Rippa tournament tomorrow (Wednesday) at Yarrow Stadium. Hopefully I'll have some good photos to share later in the week. 

Next week we will involved in a Mystery Skype Challenge where we are matched up with another school somewhere in New Zealand. The challenge is to ask yes or no questions and race the other school to find where in the country we are. The students use google maps and all have a role to play on the day. As part of this a photo scavenger hunt is underway with all the kids taking photos of 10 different things. I'll share those next week too. 

As you can see, with only a week and a half to go, it's all on - no winding down for end of term here! 

What's Up - Week 8

In maths this week we consolidate our subtracting decimals knowledge and begin to look at reversibility. This is when you can use the opposite operation to help solve a question. For example you may have a subtraction problem like 4.2 - 1.3. Using the reversibility strategy I want to turn it into an addition problem, therefore I turn it into 1.3 + __ = 4.2. If it is a multiplication problem I could reverse it into a division problem. A really effective strategy which also helps our basic facts knowledge. For example with times tables if I know 4 x 7 = 28 I also know 7 x 4 = 28. I can then use reversibility to remember my division facts, 28 ➗ 7 = 4 and 28 ➗ 4 = 7. So with every 1 times table I know I actually know 4 basic facts. On Thursday we also have to squeeze in the Otago Problem Solving challenge.

In writing we start to look at debating with the upcoming rural schools debating competition in week 10. We will learn what a debate is, what it involves and how to debate effectively. We are working towards holding debates in class to practice our new skills.

Reading becomes very self managed this week with the children being given a list of must do activities that they can achieve in any order as long as they are all completed by Friday. We will continue to strengthen the use of our prior knowledge to help us comprehend texts.

We are full steam ahead with our science fair investigations this week and children will be given the chance to develop their experiments and get things organised so they can start their tests. The kids are really enjoying this and it is great to see some of the creative ideas they are developing. Not only are they creating science experiments we also have some creating posters, capturing photos of chemical reactions, drawing scientific drawings of seeds and making water rockets.

We have Jones Cup practice again on Friday so remind children come to school with the correct sports gear.

Girls: sport shoes

Boys: mouthguard and boots

Jones Cup itself is on Monday of week 9. The newsletter this week will contain information about what children need to wear.

ANother busy week! Enjoy!

What's Up - Week 6

We are halfway through term 2 now and time is flying by and With a 4 day week this week it will continue to fly.

This week in maths we continue to develop our knowledge of decimals. We will be learning how to add decimals. Students will be able to work at the level that best suits them through using a system of practice and check. When they get stuck students will use short videos and teacher help to move them onto the next level.

Writing will be spent reflecting on our year so far. Students will be required to look back on the year and comment on different areas using a positive, minus and interesting format.

Reading continues as normal as we develop our reading comprehension strategies to help us understand the texts we read. Texts will be based around our respected enviro focuses.

Miss Jury and Mrs Hancock are both out of class on Wednesday morning as we have some Japanese PD to help us with teaching a different language.

Enjoy your week and feel free to pop in and check out some of our tech week creations. Toko Tv will also show some of what everyone got up to in tech and of course each student has completed a blog post about their tech experience.

Science and Technology Fair

This year our Year 7 and 8 students will be entering into the Science and Technology Fair. This is similar to Methanex Maths in terms of investigations, but different in the range of categories students can enter and obviously it has a science and technology theme, not a maths one.
Last week we were lucky enough to have two of the organisers come and speak to both Year 7 and 8 classes. They talked us through all the categories, showed us examples of past entries and answered our questions. There were a lot of enthusiastic students ready to start after their visit!

The categories that students can choose from are:

• Scientific Journalism

The topic for this is "Should New Zealand become more involved in the Space Industry?" Students would write an article discussing this topic. The article needs to be between 500 -3000 words. 

• Photographic Section

The topic for the photography section is "Chemical Reactions". Photos need to be on photographic paper and need to to include information of where, when and with what device the photo was taken as well as how it relates to the topic. 

• Water Rockets

Students need to make a water rocket using fizzy drink bottles. Any size bottle can be used but must be designed to withstand pressure. All rockets will be fired from a launcher at the same pressure and trajectory. Students will decide on design and how much water they add to the rocket. 

• Observational Drawing

"Seeds" is the topic for this category. The drawing has to be a scientific drawing with no shading - dots and lines are allowed. A scale must be shown.

• Advertising Poster 

The theme for the poster is "Farm Safety". It must be hand drawn and A4 size. It has to include the words "WITT Taranaki Science & Technology Fair". The winning entry will be used to advertise this year's fair. 

The two major categories are:

Science Investigation and Technological development. 

The technology project needs to identify a need and and develop a solution ( an example of this is the girl who invented the kindling cracker which is now sold world wide).  The science investigation is about explaining a phenomena - it should have a prediction and experiments. These projects are presented on large 3 way folded displays (shown in photo below) and can be completed individually or in pairs. 

Students at Toko School will be required to enter in at least one category. There is no obligation to complete either the scientific or technology project but students with the desire and / or ability will be encouraged to do so.  Some categories will require completing some parts at home. Students will be selecting their categories this week, so take the time to discuss the categories with your child as this will help them with their decisions.