Historical explorers

In Te Ngahere we are doing a panui activity about 4 historical explorers and how they made an impact on New Zealand. The four explorers are Kupe, Nukutawhiti, James Cook and Abel Tasman. Firstly we had to research about all of them and couldn’t pick a person we wanted because they liked the photos of the explorers. After we researched about them we had to choose something to create about them my group chose James Cook and we are doing a slideshow. What I enjoyed the most was researching about these explorers like how Kupe found Aotearoa. I think I did well researching about the HMS Endeavour. I think something I could do better is explain things clearer to my group when they need help.

Quick Rip with Boeden

In Te Ngahere and Te Maunga a man named Boeden (I’m not quite sure how to spell his name) came in and taught us how to play quick rip which is sort of like rippa rugby but it sets you up for tackle rugby or rugby league. The year 5 and 6’s had to play rippa rugby. When we started we played a quick warm-up game where one team was defending and one team was attacking. The problem was when you were on the defending team Boeden might call 3 attackers and 2 defenders and the defending team would never get more players than the attackers but they could get the same amount of people. After each team got to be the attacker and defender twice we started playing quick rip. To start the game off, red tags (my team) kicked off at half way, I didn’t kick off in the entire game. I was mainly a halfback for scrums and lineouts. The game was 30 - 45 minutes and will take too long to explain so I won’t explain the whole game. Once red tags had kicked off blue tags had run for the ball and caught it. When blue tags had caught the ball most of the red tags were already where blue tags were. Then the person with the ball was ripped. That’s how the game started. In this game there was nothing I disliked because it was very entertaining.

Sphero coding

In Te Ngahere we coded a robot named Sphero. You had to be up to date on your work if you wanted to code Sphero. As you can tell by its name it was shaped as a sphere (it kind of looked like BB-8). Coding Sphero was harder to code than normal coding on a website like Tynker or Code.org because you had to put how fast it should go and how many seconds it should continue moving for. Then you had the angle it should move on. So if you wanted Sphero to move forward for a while then come back you would have to put the code for it to make it go forward (0 degrees) then coming back would be 180 degrees. After we had managed to code Sphero to do that, we coded Sphero making it do a colour maze. I enjoyed coding Sphero  the whole time but it was quite annoying when we had to sign in to code with Sphero. What I did well was figuring out what angle Sphero should move on. Something I need to improve on is figuring out how fast and how long Sphero should go.

Math DLO

In Te Ngahere we have been learning how to double and half hard multiplication problems e.g 18 x 7. Do not do doubling and halving on basic facts you should know them. After we had completed a practice sheet we had to plan and create a math DLO. For this DLO we had to explain it clear so everyone could understand the DLO. Some of my DLO had arrays because they helped us work out the problem if we couldn’t quite figure the equation out and it also made it clear to understand, but some of it was writing and I had to fix it up a few times until I made it better and I still am. We also had to create another DLO that was trebling and thirding. The point of doubling and halving, trebling and thirding was it made the hard equation easy. Something I enjoyed about this whole strategy was when we had to fill out the practice activity. I think I need to improve making the DLO’s, and speed up making my DLO’s. I think I did the practice sheets well and planning of my DLO.

Marble run project

In Te Ngahere we did a project on a marble run. We had to create a ramp that we thought would make our marble roll 1.1 meters away from the end of it. If we got 1.1 meters once it was a fluke so we had to roll the marble 10 times and see how many times we were close or got 1.1 meters. If it was nowhere near 1.1 meters away then we had to modify the ramp to make it roll closer or roll to 1.1 meters. My groups ramp was a chair with a piece of cardboard which was sellotaped to the top of the chair and at the end of the ramp was a part that the marble could jump but sometimes it failed because it got stuck doing the jump. We are now going to do a competition in our school in about three weeks. I enjoyed recording how far the marble went but sometimes it was hard recording the distance because sometimes there was a misreading then we had to do it again. I think me and my group could do better at modifying our ramp because of the times it failed to roll and wedged itself on the jump. After this we made a variables DLO.