Robyn Belton Illustrator and Author

Last week Robyn Belton came to our school to tell us about her work. Robyn explained the things she needs to do to get her illustrations just right. She told us that she works on matching the illustrations to the text on each page and at the same time she tells another story with her illustrations so the reader can get a deep understanding of the story. Sometimes Robyn writes secret messages in the picture and sometimes she uses personal stories in her illustrations. Robyn spends about one year working on the illustrations for a picture book until they are ready to be published.
Robyn's favourite work at the moment is "Herbert. The Brave Sea Dog." This is the first book she has written as well as illustrated. It's a story about a true event. She told us that Freya's dad is the fisherman in the story.
One of the books that Robyn illustrated, "The Duck in the Gun", has been published on line by the National Library of New Zealand. If you would like to read this book click on this link and it will take you to the International Children's Digital Library section of the national Library of New Zealand.

What Makes Plants Grow Best?

We have finally completed our tests on the plants we have grown. The movies are all complete and the plants have gone home to be eaten. Room 5 looks like a classroom again instead of a greenhouse. Over the next week or two children will be uploading their movies onto their own blogs so please keep checking.

Book Reports on Voicethread

We have been learning how to write reports recently. For homework last week we wrote reports about books we have read.

Last Week of Drama

We have been learning drama with Jo this term. Jo has been teaching us lots of different games like dead fly, humless, mirror and lots of cool plays.At the start of drama we do the roll in cool sentences. We think she has creativity and has a sense of humour. We think she is a very good person for teaching kids. We did drama every Thursday for five weeks. We all loved it and I hope we get to work with Jo again.

Room 5's Suter Art Gallery Trip

A few days ago Room 5 went to The Suter Art Gallery to see the Paopao Ki Tua O Rangi Exibition by Ngaahina Hohaia. There was a video with decorated poi surrounding it. The poi had symbols of things that show love and respect and stuff like that. The title means ''Beat to the Rhythm''. Room 5 made our own poi and drew symbols of what was special in our families.

Keeping in Touch

This posting is really a message to Saffron. It is lovely to hear from you. Thanks for your comments on the class blog and on Grace's blog. We all hope you are having fun at your new school.
We are starting to make movies about growing our plants. It might take a while but you will be able to see what happened to your group's plants.
At the moment we are learning about weathering and erosion. We are mostly using books and Kiwi Conservation Club magazines for our research though.
Groups have asked good questions and they have already answered part of some.
How can we stop erosion and weathering?
We haven't thought of answers to the erosion part but we know now that we can't stop weathering. It's just too big for us to stop nature.
We will look forward to more comments from you Saffron. Is this your favourite colour?

Kangaroos

We are learning about copyright and how to use an image from Creative Commons. When you use a photograph from Creative Commons you always have to attribute ownership. This is the code for the photo. Click the link if you want to learn more about the photo.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ysc/ / CC BY 2.0

Look at the Kangaroo. You might like to read our kangaroo reports on our blogs.

Room 5 was an exciting place to be today! We usually have a shared lunch every time we have 1000 hits on our blog and we were a bit overdue for that. As you can see we are well on the way to our second thousand.

Another way we celebrate when we do things very well as a class is that Viv gives us Golden Points. When we get to 15 Golden Points we can choose 15 minute free play in the Adventure Playground or another fun thing we would like to do. We had a vote and decided that we would have a Pyjama day. Lots of people came to school in their PJs and some even went for the cross country run in their PJs. It was GREAT FUN and DELICIOUS.

WHAT A DAY!