Chinese New Year Cartoon Music Video

Watch this adorable video for some images of Chinese New Year. It has English translation across the top and Chinese characters across the bottom. The song is sung in Mandarin. The flag in the video is the Chinese flag.

Lantern Festival in Auckland

Willow Pattern

We read the Willow Pattern story. The design of the willow pattern plate is over two hundred years old. It was created by a man called Josiah Spode who was inspired by a real Chinese pattern called Mandarin in 1790. The willow pattern plate is always white and blue in colour.

On Monday we are going to publish some of our retells and art work about the Willow Pattern Story. Here are the first two plates to be completed in the class. Aren't they great!

Olympic Day Walk

After postponement on Tuesday, we walked Mt Iron. We left school at 10.00am and returned around 1.00. Mt Iron is a very steep walk. We walked 2 km to Mt Iron (4.5 km) and then the 2km return to school, a total of 8.5 km. There were no moans and lots of happy children.

Mount Iron is an impressive, glacier carved, rocky knoll that rises nearly 250 metres above the surrounding countryside. As a result, from the summit there are excellent 360-degree views of the The Pisa range, the Upper Clutha Basin, Lake Wanaka and the Southern Alps/Kā Tiritiri o te Moana.

The track begins over the stile by the carpark and taking the left fork, climbs through low kānuka shrubland on Mount Iron's Western side to the summit. After taking in the view and the information on the panels, follow the track to descend on the eastern side and return round the foot of the hill to the carpark.

Enjoy viewing some of our Olympic Day Walk.

Giant Panda

View this YouTube video on the Giant Panda because tomorrow we are going to learn more about Giant Pandas and how they relate to China.

The Great Wall of China

Yesterday we read lots of information about the Great wall of China and learnt how to surf, slurp and summarise. Surfing is doing a quick surf down the page to locate key words. Slurping is reading more deeply and summarising is writing what we learned in our own words using key words and phrases. Today we began to surf, slurp & summarise independently. We plan to finish tomorrow.

Battleships - Play against the computer!

Rush Hour

We have this game in the classroom because it develops thinking and problem-solving skills. Try to see what level you can get to on the online version of this game.

Olympic Games 2008 Pt 2

Olympic Games 2008 Pt1

2008 Olympic Clips from CCTV

Up coming activity for Olympic Day

Monday,23 June is annual Olympic Day. Our whole school will be walking up Mt Iron on Tuesday as part of Olympic Day.
Click on the 'Bring on Beijing 2008' icon to see some of the activities teachers can choose from.

Check on the Olympic Rings to find out about Olympic Day in NZ.

Pengy Visited Wanaka Primary School

Pengy is Cardrona Ski Field's mascot, who visits our school every year to tell us all about being safe on the mountain. Carol and Janina brought Pengy much to the kid's delight. They told us about all the new things up on the mountain too and reminded us about the importance of wearing goggles or sun glasses on the mountain. Our ski programmes are booked for the end of August to beginning of September, so hopefully there will be snow by then. Most of us ski at either Cardrona or Treble Cone. A few families prefer cross-country skiing at the Snow Farm.
Click on either picture to find out about our local ski fields.
Cardrona Snow Farm

Treble Cone

Assembly Presentations

On Friday Room Ten organised and presented the first assembly. Our theme was China and more specifically the story of the 'Willow Pattern'. We sung a Chinese New Year song called 'Gung Hay Fat Choy', presented a play about the 'Willow Pattern', shared retells and showed our 'Willow Pattern' artwork.

April Samantha's Chinese Friend) came to visit.

On Friday, April, Samantha's Chinese friend came to school to talk to us about life in China . She told us lots of interesting facts, showed us some Chinese writing and answered our many questions. Thank you April!

Festival of Music

The Upper Clutha Festival of Music was held on Wednesday (18th June) and Thursday (19th June)night. Here are some pictures of Wanaka Primary performing. The Gypsy choir was the Middle Syndicate's presentation. A fun night got all!

Chinese Zodiac Memory Game

Try this memory game. Find all these pairs to uncover your Chinese New Year surprise! When you find a match, a part of the surprise gets revealed. Chinese symbols include the following animals of the Chinese zodiac: dog, dragon, horse, monkey, pig, rabbit, rat, rooster, snake and tiger. Each time you play, the cards get shuffled around.
How many attempts will it take you to find all the matches?

The Great Wall of China

Watch a dragon boat race from CBBC Newsround

Take an interactive tour of the Great Wall of China.
Look out the three different windows then continue your journey through the door. Look for the red hot spots in the panorama and click them. Press and hold your mouse on the panorama and move left, right, up or down. Also use the controls on the lower left to zoom and pan.

Map the Regions of China

Courtney asked me to try and find some more games based around our inquiry of China.

Map of China (1)
Click on the map to start the game.
Try out this jigsaw. You click on each region for clues as to where it belongs in China. Then drag it to the appropriate place to make the map of China.

Map of China (2)
Click on the green map of China, then click on a location to learn more.

Adventure Island

What is Adventure Island?
Click on the sign to find out more.
It is designed around the book 'Kensuke's Kingdom' by Michael Morpurgo, but can also be used as a stand-alone project for classes. Without needing to understand any computer language, classes can create an online island that other people can visit and explore. It can involve imaginative and descriptive writing, perhaps diary or poetry writing. There are challenges and puzzles for the visitor to solve. As the visitor travels around the island, descriptive writing for each area encourages them to explore further. Will they be able to survive, and leave the Island, or will they remain forever ... trapped?
We are going to try this out over the next few weeks. We'll let you know more soon.

The Willow Pattern

The Willow Pattern, a traditional Chinese story.
We read the story of 'The Willow Pattern', listened to an audio version and viewed a power point. It was amazing to see the way parts of the story changed each time it was retold. We then retold the story in written form. Some of us have already published, some are on their second draft, others are at the proof reading and editing stage. We will publish some stories on the blog next week. We also retold the story through visual art on white paper plates using different blue media. Annie was extremely proud of our efforts which are now displayed on the wall. The Smarties reading group are retelling the story through drama (role play) and will present this in assembly on Friday.

Visual Language- Moving Images (Using language, symbols and texts)

Last week we explored moving images. We watched a movie called 'Mulan'. The plot goes like this...To save her father from death in the army, a Chinese maiden secretly goes in his place and becomes one of China's greatest heroes in the process. We enjoyed this movie not only because it was a great story, but because it provided us with a great deal of knowledge of China, especially the ancient history. We explored the theme of traditional roles of male and female in ancient China. We also learned about the Huns and developed more 'Wonderings'. We will be exploring these very soon. During the last third of the movie we looked at the different types of shots, then completed a cut and paste activity where we had to match the shot name to the photo. Over the next week we are going to use 'Movie Maker' to produce our own movies around a China theme. We will also use music from China to go with our movies.

Using photos in our inquiry

Over the past two days we have been looking at photos. We looked at a set of photos about 'Life in a Yi Village'. Above are two of the photos we looked at.

Here are the focus questions for these photos.

What might the crops be?

Why is the hillside terraced?

What are the poles for?

What do they mean for the village?

How many trees are there?

Why aren't there more trees?

What is the man doing?

Why is all available space used?

What are the flat dish-like items?

What has happened in the space covered with mats?

What is going to happen?

What is in the background?

Pirate Crews

Division is all about sharing. We thought it was hard at first but soon found out it was easier than we thought. This was our learning intention.

WALT solve problems by sharing sets

Division is lots of fun especially when we become pirates and share out the gold from the ships we have raided.

Caleb has a cheesy grin. I think he must know the answer. Who was right? They both knew the answer. Great problem-solvers.

Fractions are Fun!

Skrbl

Simple and easy online multi user whiteboard. Click 'start skrbl now' to use the whiteboard. Try it out. We will talk more about it at school.

Snacktivities

We are a physically active school. We did a snacktivity today with our chairs. It was fun! We all realise how being physically active helps us learn better and keeps us healthy.