Term 2: Week 5

Field Trip to Wellington City

A couple of weeks ago the syndicate jumped on the bus and headed to Wellington City. We had two locations on our itinerary; firstly Carter Observatory to get the 'juices flowing' for our inquiry on Space Exploration then to Te Papa to visit the new WW1 exhibit 'The Scale of Our War'. Both events were extremely entertaining and thought provoking. We were all particularly blown away by the giant models in the WW1 exhibit created by Weta Workshop. They looked so real, almost like they were about to come to life!

Using WW1 to inspire our writing

After visiting Te Papa some of the students used the stories from the real life characters in the exhibit as motivation for their own diary writing. Check out Saxon, Rosa and Joshua who presented theirs in assembly.

  Shrinking the Solar System

To start our Space Exploration inquiry for Science we wanted to get a sense of just how huge not only our solar system is but the entire galaxy. Often one of the best ways to get a good understanding of massive distances is to actually shrink things down in scale then relate it to what we already know. In this activity we shrunk the Sun to have a diameter of only 1km. We then scaled down all the distances each planet is from the sun to match. We used Google Maps to show the orbit of each planet. Below are some examples from Samantha in Room 24.

SPARKS - PPP

Last Friday was our final session on our Personal Passion Projects. We all had so much fun with these projects. It has been amazing to see such a huge variety of topics studied and seeing everyone so engaged in their learning. This week is a time to reflect on the learning journey before we share our work with the everyone. On Friday 6th June we are inviting parents and students to come and see our wonderful projects but if you can't wait, here's a taste on what will be on offer - an interesting proposal by Kieran and a brand new Jump Jam dance by Rosie and Helena. Top job guys!