Jerusalem Blogger's Are Getting Busy Blogging This Term - Watch This Space!

Term three learning

 In term three our theme was Utopia (although a couple of children chose Dystopia).  The children had to create their own perfect world.  Here is the slideshow they worked from:

Here are some of the amazing creations that Jerusalem learners came up with:

Here is a link to Emma's advertisement.  This is Kinae's law and order work.

Term two - lockdown and back to school

 During term two, we chose our own topic to look into.  This made sure that the children were engaged and interested in their learning.   Here are some of the amazing creative pieces of learning that these children have done.

Noah S had some incredible research about Greek Mythology

 

 Kinae worked on her science experiment:  

 Leevy learnt some sign language:  

 Meesha create an awesome model of a Maori Pa:  

 Syrhys made a pick a path story:

The Popcorn challenge...

We had a popcorn challenge in our class. 
 This was our activity:

Design brief: Create a new exciting flavour of popcorn and suitable packaging for our class movie afternoon. The packaging must look good and be easy to access. The popcorn needs to be crisp (not soggy) and delicious! Important: the flavour of your group’s popcorn must take into account the things that certain members of your team cannot eat.


Stage 1:  Planning for practice:  This is where you plan what you need and what you intend to do.  It is important to make sure you read the design brief to make sure that your ideas will create an outcome that meets the brief.


 Stage 2: Brief development: This is where you create your new flavour - I think you will need to try things, test things, taste things, and change things before you come out with an outcome that fits the design brief. You will also need to try to develop your packaging and test it to make sure it holds the popcorn and is easy to get the popcorn out of. 

 Stage 3: Outcome development and evaluation: This is where you have other people (stakeholders) try your product and then you all evaluate to see if it meets the design brief - is it fit for purpose? We had a planning day, a practice day and a competition day, and then we finished with an evaluation afternoon. 

 Everyone worked really well together and we create some amazing popcorn. Here are four of our groups:

Top Bloggers and Star Learners

The learners of Jerusalem have been doing some amazing learning. Mrs Bellis has created a space on our Class Site to celebrate great learning. If you get the chance, click on this link to check out our top bloggers and have a look at their blogs and click on this link to see our star learners.  This year we are striving for excellence.

transformations and tessellation in maths

In class we are learning all about Transformation.  We have had a challenge to creating a logo to represent ourselves.  We then need to use it to make some transformations.  Here is Heidi's logo challenge:


Here is Syrhys's Challenge:


We are learning about polygons and using them to create tessellations.  We looked at the artwork of Escher and then we had to create our own tessellation using either a parallelogram or an octagon as the base shape.

Here is Bayley's tessellation:



Here is Liam's:

More amazing Learning from Jerusalem Learners!

Pyper created a model and habitat of a zebra:


 Nixon created a model and habitat of a taipan:


 Jayden shows us a model and habitat of the Nile crocodile:

 Jackson created a red deer habitat:
 

 Estella shows us the koala and it's habitat:


Ella created an axolotl ans it's habitat:

Kinae makes a model and habitat of a komodo dragon

We have been learning about an animal of our choice.  On of our activities was to create a model of our animal and it's habitat.  This was intended to be done at school, however we all moved to alert level four and began our learning from home.  The innovative and creative ways of the learners in Jerusalem have really been a highlight of this isolation time.  They are just fabulous!  Make sure you check out the individual blogs on the side of this (our class blog) to see what everyone has been up to.  Meanwhile, enjoy viewing the amazing example that Kinae has created.

Kinae Has also created her own Site all about her animal learning.  It looks fabulous and has a lot of informative and interesting information as well as  her coding and art activities.  What a massive effort Kinae!  Check out Kinae's Site.

Tell us what you think about Kinae's work!

Noah writes about dolphins

Noah S has been very busy creating an explanation about the impact of humans on dolphins.  I think he has written a fabulous, comprehensive explanation.  What do you think?

What impact do humans have on dolphins?


Would you believe me if I told you there is a pink dolphin swimming around in the shining blue amazon river. You wouldn’t would you, you would only think that there are only blue, black and white dolphins. Well this is about them, yes the pink dolphins it’s also about the ordinary one’s as well and how you affect them.


What does impact mean? Impact means you have a strong effect on that person or thing. For example a struggling student who needs special attention and/or needs help with their learning, social skills or their physical education. That teacher has an impact on that student by helping them with that particular problem. Also another example is a tornado came through a farmer's land and wrecked all his crops. That farmer might have been relying on those crops for the money he got from the market when he sold them. He might’ve had to sell his great great grandma’s vase or had to sell some of his land. That tornado made a great impact in a bad way for that farmer but the struggling student was impacted by the teacher in a good way.


My first point is about overfishing and catching dolphins in nets. Dolphins, sharks and other big sea animals are impacted by overfishing because fishermen take more than they should. They take millions of fish when they should take less which makes dolphins starve which they have to go to more dangerous parts of the sea to get food. Which comes to my next part about nets and hooks. Since the dolphins have to go to the threatening waters that’s where the boats with the nets and hooks are. 300,000 whales and dolphins are dying from fishing gear a year.


My second point is about chemical spills in the ocean. In 2010 The deepwater horizon oil spill affected the dolphins who lived in the area. Some got lung disease, hormonal abnormalities and 128 deaths of dolphins and whales and they also found out that 6,400 marine mammals may have been harmed because of the BP oil spill. Following the oil spill there have been high numbers of stranded dolphins in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Since dolphins have to come above the water to breathe they can inhale chemicals which can cause lung cancer. It also burn’s membranes around the eyes and also can irritate the skin and inflame the skin.


My third point is about illegal feeding and boat strikes. The Marine Mammal Protection Act made in 1972 made feeding dolphins illegal and you can get fined to up to 200,000 dollars and a year in prison. The reason for this is because they would train their calves to beg for food instead of hunting. This is very dangerous because if they begged someone could hurt them or the dolphin could hurt the person which would be bad because the dolphin could get put down or something similar. Boat strikes are dangerous and one of them happened in Sydney Australia. Two of the rarest animals in the world were harmed during a boat strike. They were two out of the three snubfin dolphins at Roebuck bay. There are 161 identified snubfin dolphins in coastal waters around the tourist town Broome. 124 were photographed and 63% bore scars and cuts.


My fourth and final point is about habitat degradation and climate change affecting dolphins. Habitat degradation is the loss of the places they live because humans destroy all the places that dolphins need to survive. Instead they have to settle for less favourable places that don’t have enough food or have the wrong temperature. Climate change is also another problem. The climate is changing fast and some dolphin populations may not have enough time to adapt. The sea temperature, freshening of seawater and the rises of the sea. The warming of the planet is causing a loss of habitats for dolphins. It is also affecting their timing and ranges of their migration and also their reproduction.


In Conclusion, now you know what we do to those pink amazon dolphins and those snubfin Aussie dolphins and even the normal blue, white and black dolphins. We need to make a change and we need to do it now. The end.


By Noah Smith

Zentangle Art

While we have had nga kararehe (animals) as our topic, we have been learning about the lines and strokes of creating Zentangle art.  A few students did this in the classroom at school, but many have carried on with this task at home.  What wonderful creative pieces they have produced!  Tell us what you think?

This is Leevy's  Butterfly:

This is Kinae's komodo dragon:

This is Heidi's hen:

This is Meesha's Stag:

Learning from Home...

This week we were back to school from the holidays - however, of course, because of Covid 19 we are all learning from home. We had 27/31 at our first online class session. What a great turnout! It certainly is different, but so far so good. It was great to talk to everyone again!

The empty classroom...

The day after we found out that our country (New Zealand) was about to go into lockdown, our teachers had to get prepared.  Only two children came to school the next day, everyone else stayed home.  The teachers worked hard at developing ways to teach us from home.  They delivered devices, they gave out learning packs, they updated  our learning sites and of course, they got our classroom ready for 4 weeks of being empty.  Mrs Bellis had a lot of plants to take home and care for!  Then, she had to set up somewhere at home to work from.  Our class is having a google meet each weekday at 10am - even in the holidays just to help us keep up our social connections

The empty classroom:

The plants that Mrs B took home:

Mrs B, working from home:

Lego Day!

We had a lego day out our school.  The challenge for our class was to create a lego car that could go the longest distance (when we let it go at the top of a ramp).  We had some great looking cars and some of them went a really long way, some didn't!  It was a lot of fun.

Saint Patrick's Day

This is our class - Jerusalem.  Because our school is named after Saint Patrick, we celebrate Saint Patrick's day.  We all get dressed in green, we play games and learn about Saint Patrick.  We had a few away but here is most of our class.

Skoolkit - Get New Zealand Writing 2020

We have been working on a get NZ writing schoolkit this week.  We have been creating some fabulous poems and working really well together to create sestina poems too.   Who knew how fabulous we we could be at writing poems?  We are so happy with our outcomes. 

We have been learning about fables this term.  We looked at some of Aesop's fables and then we identified what a fable needs.  We created our own fables.  This was a very enjoyable activity and we had some amazing fables written!   Check these ones out and tell us what you think!

Praying with colour

This week we started with a meditation prayer where we were praying with colour - we were drawing and colouring the people that were in our thought. Mrs Bellis noticed that we had an extremely settled day - what a fabulous way to set up for a day of learning.



 

2020 Begins...

Kia ora koutou!   We are already in week two. We have been spending our time getting to know each other.  We have done some team problem solving, we have made our class rules and we are currently working on self portraits.  This week is filled with testing and swimming, the days are just flying by.  Jerusalem has moved this year and we are now on the other side of the school.  Check out our classroom.

We have also created a prayer wall in our class where we can put our special prayer for people.  Many of us have been praying for Australia because of the bushfires.  Check out our prayers:

Finding Patterns

Today we worked in small groups to find patterns.  This activity created a lot of mathematical discussion and justification.  We found a lot of patterns and it was really challenging and rewarding when we were trying to explain our ideas.  Can you find anymore patterns?

Our Anti-Bullying Campaign

We have been working very hard on raising awareness about bullying and what we could do if it was happening to us or we saw it happening in our school.  Our class collaborated and we created a site with all of our information and presentations.  Please follow this link to have a look at our Anti-Bullying presentation.