Art with Peter Max

Mrs Croll introduced us to perspective drawing by artist Peter Max.   He is a German-born American illustrator and graphic artist, known for the use of psychedelic shapes and colour palettes.   We were inspired by his work from the 1960s where he used bright, neon colours.   Peter Max was interested in astronomy and this is reflected in his art which included stars, sun rays and planets.

We learned about ruling from a visual point (the VP)  and placement of shapes on paper.  We are using water colours to achieve the bright colours - just like Peter Max did.

Hiwi the Kiwi

Week 4 started with a surprise when Mrs Croll told Room 19ers that we were off to the hall to the 'Hiwi the Kiwi' show.  We were entertained by the humourous lyrics and stories from Minstrel - with the help from his wife - Mrs Minstrel!

We learned about special places called 'marine reserves' where we are not allowed to fish.   Minstrel told us that we could lose our boat and car as a consequence of fishing in a marine reserve.

He showed us a special ruler sticker that can be stuck on the side of the boat.  We can use this ruler to measure the fish that we catch to make sure that we are not taking any baby fish out of the sea.   Fish are measured from the tip of their mouth to the 'V' in the tail.  Minstrel suggested that we pick up the fish with a wet towel so that we don't disturb any of its scales.   We also learned that the big fish should be put back too.  Libby (from Room 16) won a prize because she told us that this big fish might be a 'mother'.  Minstrel added that both the mother and father fish are needed back in the water becuase they are the fish that are going to make babies.  So, all the big fish should be put gently put back in the water.

Sharysse won a poster because she was able to translate 'kai moana'.  

We sung a song with Minstrel which included hand actions too.
Kai Moana
Kai moana food from the sea 
Kai moana to feed the family
Fish for the future and there will always be
Kai moana for you and me

A joke from Minstral:
Q:  How do you keep a fish cool?
A:  Put sunglasses on it!   (ha ha ha...)

Minstrel gave us a challenge of making up our own hand movements to the words of a song about eating a slater from a refridgerator and having it for lunch, with tomato sauce so that you can't hear the crunch (eeewww!)     Lachie, from Room 6, was selected by Mrs Minstrel for having the best hand jive.  He won a huge prize bag that included a poster (that he had to go and ask Mrs Nankivell to laminate), a magazine and a Kilwell cap.

We also learned the following:

• Always use salt ice, not fresh water ice for keeping the fish cool and clean the fish in salt water.  Your fish will taste a lot better.
• How a locater beacon and flare works if we have an accident while we are on the water.  We need to ring the Coastguard, or Police if we see a flare.   
• If we are on the water, we might see orange smoke.  This is likely to be coming from another type of flare, while a person (or people) could be waiting to be rescued.

Now, we are going to put this learning into practise to write some fabulous stories that include any of the things that we have learned about keeping safe on the water and making sure that our kai moana is preserved for future generations to enjoy, just like we do now.   We hope that one of our stories will be published in the magazine.

Week 3

Book Week

This week we had our annual Scholastic book fair.  The whole school was dressed in their favourite book character.  Some looked really good.  Even one person was dressed as a Minecraft character.  Five people  were taken from each class to walk on the catwalk in the hall.   And the people from our class were Keagan (ghost buster's sign from the movie/book), Sofie (a super-girl), Briana  (Katniss from the awesome Hunger Games), Leeland (Robin Hood) and last of all Sophie O's (Anne from Anne of Green Gables).

The coolest Book Characters ever!

(Can you spy Sharysse?  She came as Harry Potter, wearing his invisible cloak)

Cross Country

Some people from our class ran with the Yr 7 & 8's for Cross Country to see if they qualify for ECCS cross country competition. They did really well and they came back huffing and puffing, and the people who got through to ECCS cross country (east counties country schools) are Sofie, Keagan and Sophie O's. 

Dance Competition

Briana has been busy dancing her shoes off.  She is in our school's dance team and they were performing on Monday and Tuesday night at Elim School, along with students from other schools in the Howick area.

       

Art with Mr Braddock

We are learning how to draw a rabbit

Step 1

We used our maths skills to check and measure how the object is going to fit on the page.  Our page is split into thirds.  We decided how far away parts of the body were from the edge of the page.

First work out the start and the finish lines eg. where the head and body will be. Then work out the big shapes e.g. the body.  After that work out the smaller shapes e.g. feet.

Step 2

Every new thing gets measured off what you have already done eg. we checked the width of the ear against measurement that we already had for the eye from the top of the page.

We got to stand up and share what we had done so far and make any changes.  

Step 3

Now we changed from pencil to crayon to do fine detail and shading.  We looked for the dark things first.  Check for things like the sparkle in the eye. 

This part was quite tricky because our crayons were fat.   

Step 4

Add yellowish dye to colour the rabbits body with sunshine.    Add a browny blue to the shady parts of its body.  Use blue for the shady side 

What we thought about our art:
"It was fun because we learned all the steps to get to the shading"
"Little bits, like the shading were hard to do"
"The eye was difficult to do because it was hard to get it like Mr Braddock's one.   Maybe it was because he was using a hard and thinner crayon than we were"
"We liked it when he dyed the rabbit at the end and added the finishing touches"
"The dye made the rabbit stand out"

Beginning of Term 3

Fitness
Our focus this term is to get ourselves fit and ready for cross country.  On Monday we started our fitness programme with a Beep test.    This is when you run 20m, starting with 10 seconds and it decreases by one second every ten laps.  We played 'Giants and Lumberjacks'.  This is when the Lumberjacks try to knock over 6 cones while the Giants pick them up.   If all the cones are knocked over then the Lumberjacks win.

            

Art
On Thursday we learned about Peter Max.  He is an illustrator and graphic artist.  We looked at some of his colourful artwork which was produced in the 1970s.   He uses a visual point to help create 3D look with his shapes.    Next week we will be adding colour to our own masterpieces.

Speeches
In class we have been practising how to write different styles of speeches.   The three different types of speeches are narrative, entertaining, persuasive, motivational and informative.    Our next step is to actually write a proper speech for the class speech competition which will be before Friday 30 August.   We might post some videos of our speeches... so don't go anywhere!

Wearable Arts
On Wednesday the whole school met in the hall for our Wearable Arts show.   The show was put into four categories: Margaret Mahy, Maori traditions,  Space, Out of the Box then Beauty and Colours.   Our class entry was worn by Keagan.  We dressed him up like a robot with bubble wrap, rope, plastic bags, chain, flexible tubes, and wires.  His cape was made from some silver fabric from an old screen.  We even used a computer board thing.

Waiata & Jump Jam
Our amazingly talented Mr Garmey taught us three new songs - one was made up.  They were 'A.E.I.O.U', 'We are Beachlands Primary School' (to the tune of Sweet Home Alabama), 'Three Little Birds (by Bob Marley).   Mr Garmey played the guitar while we we sang.   He was brilliant and didn't even have to look at it while he was playing.