Category: Hanga | Create

For the last two week in Te Ngahere we have been learning about the Possum and its effect on the Ngahere. We have also learned about how they came to NZ and how rapidly they spawned across the country. To learn this, we did a reading called the possum problem. After completing the Response To Text or RTT, we made a create about the population growth and effect of the possum to NZ on a google slide presentation. Luckily, I was able to make it with one of my friends. Then we has to record over the slides and narrate what is happening. Here is our recording.

For the past several weeks in Te Ngahere we have been learning about the Nghahere (forest) and its ecosystem. After learning about consumers, producers and decomposers, we built our own ecosystem with examples of mutualism and what I have explained above. We built them on Minecraft Education Edition. Our Minecraft world shows decomposers such as worms and mushrooms breaking down organic matter, producers such as trees and plants photosynthesising. It also shows consumers/animals in glass cages so they can be viewed without them escaping. The mutualism that is shown is a Tui and a tree. The Tui gains food and a home from the tree, and the tree gains the Tui’s seed dispersing ability to grow more trees in a vast area distribution. Thinking back I think our progress each day that was made on the world was good. The one thing that could be better was to get a better recording than the one we ended up with. I hope you will enjoy our video.

This term in Te Ngahere we have been working on our projects for the science fair.
Our group ( Linton, Logan and I) have been working on our project, our science fair is about figuring out if different types of music affect people’s heart rate. We chose this to be our project because we wanted to help people with heart conditions like SVT (Supraventricular tachycardia) a heart condition which affects the upper chambers of a person’s heart. Our Hypothesis was that sad and hyper music would increase a person’s heart rate and calm music would decrease it. To test if our hypothesis was correct, we tasted ten people from our class between the ages of 11-12, at the same time between 9:30-10:30. We got them to sit in the green back room next to our class with the curtains down. They looked at a white Velcro dot while we took their resting heart rates, and heart rate after the sad, hyper and calm songs.
On the school science fair day our group came in second place! So tomorrow, Thursday the 21st of august, we are going to the Turner Centre in KeriKeri.

This week in Te Ngahere we have been researching all about volcanoes. We read about White island, we wrote an explain piece all about the formations of volcanoes and we wrote a moment in time about a volcano’s eruption where the main character survives.

We were also lucky enough to have a real life geologist talk to us about volcanoes.

In order for our main character to survive in our moment in time story, we needed to give them a piece of technology or vehicle durable to survive a volcano eruption.

In my story I gave the main character a type of suit that I call a PVS.This stands for Prototype Volcanologist Suit. This is what I created.

In Te Ngahere this week we have been Investigating New zealand’s atrocious school lunches nutritional values. While doing so we are making a creative, banksy like art, or writing and performing spoken word poetry on our devices. 

Did you know that these lunches contain fifty three percent of the nutrients that the are supposed to? Not to mention that they only spend three dollars per child each day on these lunches.

Even though these lunches are appalling, they are helpful for the financially challenged people and their 

Families. In a way, I believe that spending less on the lunches are actually wasting more money due to tall of the lunches being scrapped. So many resources  that could have become tasty food are being thrown out.

In Te Ngahere we have been working on something called the great marble challenge. A few weeks ago we completed this challenge, but not to the best of our ability.

The majority of the class decided to redo the challenge, so that’s just what we did. The objective was to get the marble at exactly 110 cm from the end of the ramp. Due to how close you get you can score points. They different points you can score are 5, 3,2, and 1 points. If you score five your marble is within 1.1 cms. of the 110 mark for 3 points you are within 5.5cm, 2=11 cm and 1 points is within 22 cms.
Anywhere further away than that and you score zero points for your roll

As we were practising with our ramp we were scoring on average 25-42 points which is unreal. Considering that the maximum possible score is 50.
We mustn’t have thought about the variables to seriously because on the day the marble challenge was held over an unlevel area of the floor. Thus scoring only 7 points.

Our group didn’t let many students and teachers test our ramp. Even though they would have given us valuable feedback.

n Te Ngahere last week we decided to participate in a class challenge. The challenge was to make a marble run, the aim was to make the marble stop at 110 cms from the end of the track. 

The  point system worked out like this. 5 points=1.1cm, 3 points=5.5 cm, 2 points=11cm, 1 point=22cm and if you land anywhere further away you get 0 points. On the day of the great marble challenge, you only get 10 rolls per team.

Our group only scored 4 points. We started of with a big ramp but it got destroyed when we transported it to the backroom. At the competition we only had a very small ramp.

Each group had to write instructions for their ramps because they can’t operate their own ramp. Next time I will try harder to build a successful ramp with my group.

I think our group did well with consistently getting the marble in the same place . our group also did well with turning up with something, we had a really tough time trying to build our ramp.

This week in Te Ngahere, our teachers talked to us about the Summer Learning Journey. Then we did some work about shells to get us inspired to start off with the summer learning journey. We watched a few videos about shells. That taught us about where shells come from, what they’re used for and who uses them.  We all made a piece of art out of shells from google. So I decided to make  my name.

Hello, its me Noah from Paihia School. In Te Ngahere we have been learning about fractions. To do so we were given sheets with questions on them. Reflecting back to when we did this, I really enjoyed simplifying fractions to the lowest that they can be. For example: 4/8 = ½.
After we learned about fractions we made a D.L.O to display what we have learned. Next time I could do better with understanding the way fractions work. I believe that I did well with fixing improper fractions.

Hello, its me Noah from Paihia School. In Te Ngahere we were learning about ships from the back in the 17th century. Along with a crew who got stuck on Auckland Island. One thing that threw me was that Auckland Island is Nowhere near Auckland. The island is actually 465 kms south of bluff! In the text about the crew, there was a little girl called Nellie. She almost let the fire go out which is not good because they didn’t have any more matches. Also the island is very cold. I wrote a diary for a man named Mr Hawkings. This man was on the island at that time. Here’s what i think he would think.