We went on a whole school visit to Shantytown as part of our inquiry study on toys through the ages. We voted and decided not to dress up in Victorian Costumes this time so we were really comfortable. Our school only has 65 students so we enjoyed doing lots of things together, although the seniors did get to do some different things like stilts. We were really interested in a timeline that the teachers had made out there with examples of the toys through time. They got a lady to come and show us her doll collection which was fascinating even for the boys. There was also a man who had stream powered models which were really interesting. We played lots of games and had an awesome day while learning new things and having new experiences.

    

-----Mihi-----

We are really sorry you can't see these we will try to change the setting so you can.

The Blaketown Garden  Club

Here  are some students   from our class they are cleaning up and planting some new plants in the garden. This garden is so cool they clean it up and plant new cool stuff in the garden like foods that we can eat.  At lunch on Tuesday the garden club meet up and sometimes they give us food like dips and good fresh vegetables,  bread rolls with  vegetables, lettuce rolls and muffins made with the produce. A lot of  students go to garden club and work on growing seeds, wedding and craft projects.  We have made mosaic tiles for the gravel area and painted  gumboots we have filled with plants as decorations around the school. We have a bath that we grow carrots in and as part of our sustainability unit we recycled tyres to make a herb garden.

  

     

At our school we are really into cycling as we are right beside the West Coast Wilderness Cycle Trail. This means we do lots of biking. Each Monday our class bikes to the local Aquatic Centre for swimming, this is part of our fitness. After swimming we have a vote about which route we will take back to school. One way involves going down a steep hill called Brewery Hill as its beside the Monteiths Brewery, this is probably our favourite as we can cruise down really fast. Our other favourite way is biking into town to the Grey River and getting on the Cycle Trail at The Warehouse, the biking around the harbour, fishing boats and down to the Tip Head (river mouth) to see if there are any fishing boats coming in then back to school. The third way we often choose is to bike past our local aerodrome (on the cycle trail) and stop at the local BMX track to play.  The longest trip we have done was at the end of term one and as our last day treat we went on a bus and biked 42km along the trail back to school. It was an awesome day with lots of laughter. Some people learnt more about resilience on the hills and as they got tired in the hot sun.

Every second week the year 7 and 8 students from our class go to High School for technology. They are away all day so we get to do different challenges. As we are studying toys through the ages at present, today we have had to design and build a balloon powered car. We are testing to see whose car will go the further-est. We have all had lots of different ideas and had to make lots of changes as we built them. We are trialing different sized wheels and thinking about wind resistance.

We had Dr Fiona Beals visit as part of the Sir Peter Blake Dream Team. Both her and her husband are ex West Coasters and worked with us doing hands on tasks that fostered team work. We had to make stretchers using duct tape, these had to carry a junior student. It was heaps of fun. We ran out of time as she had also planned for us to make towers using spaghetti and 1 metre of masking tape, the tower had to hold a marshmallow on top. We ended up doing this task after she left then eating the marshmallows. It sounded like this was going to be easy but it took lots of thinking about as well as everyone working together. When we researched this we found that younger students are more successful at this task ad they don't over think things they just build and change things as they go.

We are doing Buddy Reading with the Junior School. This is working well and is really enjoyable with all of us learning new things about listening, praising and reading strategies. We do this four days a week. Each day we not only read, we evaluate and do a related activity if we finish early.