Thinking About Children's Rights

We started our new Inquiry topic by using the Questioners Key from Thinking Keys to help us think about Children's Rights. These are some of the questions we designed.

1. Why don’t children in other countries have the right to live in peace?
2. Why don’t children in other countries have rights in the same way as we do?
3. What if children had to go to war?
4. What would happen if children didn’t have enough food?
5. How does Nelson Central School provide clean water for children?
6. How do poor children get an education in other countries?
7. Why do some children have to work when they should be going to school?
8. What might happen if children were not respected?
9. Why don’t children in other countries have clean air like us?
10. What if children didn’t have the right to clean water?
11. Why don’t children in other countries have the right to a safe and healthy shelter?
12. How does Nelson Central School help children have the right to an education?
13. Why can’t some children in other countries have the freedom to say their ideas?

We will be researching these and over questions over the next few weeks so we will show you more of our work then.

Matariki

After doing all the hard work with our research and choir practice it was finally time to have some Matariki celebrations. The Magical Stars evening on Tuesday was great! It started with all of the choir and their families sharing tea in the hall. This was followed by a truly magical night where the choir entertained us in the church. They sang songs composed by New Zealanders and some of the composers were there to hear their work. Cliff Fell even sang his song and played with the choir. After that there were fireworks to keep the night sparkling.
On Wednesday we gave our buddies star badges to say Happy New Year. Later our Syndicate ate together and had lovely Matariki cakes as a treat to finish off.
What a wonderful celebration we had!

Story making

I found this activity on a blog by the Wockets of Palmerston North. Have a try at writing your own stories. You might even be clever enough to save them as a comment so we can all read them. I'll find out more about that from Marama, the Wockets' teacher,if you have trouble. Enjoy! Thanks Wockets!

Our Inquiry Learning Research for Matariki

Our Inquiry topic for the last two weeks was Matariki so we have been researching Maori traditions by using the Te Papa website. We needed to draw our own pictures because the photos of the artefacts on the website are copyright. We tried to write our information in our own words and that was a big challenge for us.
Our eLearning skill was to insert photographs into a word document and to remember to
SAVE OUR WORK.
Read our research documents and send us a comment to tell us what you think of our work.
Matariki Combined Research

Questionaut

I was looking at some other blogs and I found a game that you might like to play. It's a very gentle game where you wave the mouse over parts of the picture until you find the questioner. Next you answer some english and maths questions. The questions can be quite tricky so you might need an adult to help you with the answers. It's called Questionaut. Click on the link or the picture. I hope you like it.

Drama in Space

Every Tuesday we go to drama classes in the Hall. Jo, our drama teacher has been teaching us how to create a story set in a space ship. We have been working on it for a few weeks now and every week we make another scene in the story. We make up our own actions and speaking parts and we work in groups of four. This week we were in our mother ship and we had some bad news. There were two problems; the ship engine broke down and couldn't be mended, and there were only three places in the capsule back to earth. We had to act that part out and we needed to persuade the people back on Earth that we deserved to have one of the seats. Viv made a video of one group. Who do you think deserves to go in the capsule?

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Our School Cross Country Event

Last Wednesday we held our school Cross Country event. On Saturday some people from our class competed in the Interschool event at Saxtons Field too.
We have been writing recounts about the Cross Country and we will be blogging them over the next weeks so keep checking on our personal blogs to see them.
It was a great afternoon!

Nelson Girls College Music Group

We went to a wonderful concert in the hall this morning. A music group from Nelson Girls College performed for us. They sang in small groups and in a large choir. There was a guitar group as well and a girl playng a green clarinet. Christine said we were a wonderful audience and that we could look forward to performing music when we go to college.