Samoan Language Week

"Lalaga le si'osi'omaga mo se lumana'i manuia

Weave an environment for a better future."

This is our theme for Samoan Language Week 2019. In Team 5 we've enjoyed learning words and phrases we can use everyday like saying "tulou". Always excuse yourself if your movements are going to obstruct the view of others.

Check out some highlights from todays assembly.

Fa'afetai ma ia manuia tele le toe vaiaso.

Maths on Scratch!

Check out what Zaeeda got up to in maths this week!

Since this week is tech week we decided to take our maths into coding. We used scratch to show and teach our learning. The first thing we did was learn about different types of transformations, thanks to a video Mrs Stone found on youtube it wasn't a problem to remember these. Then we had to use coding to show different transformations. When we finished coding and testing it we screencastified and then put it on our blogs!
I hope you enjoyed this task. I definitely did, I am super excited about what we will be doing later on. We will be doing something like this for our animation so stay tuned during the ending of this term.

Year 8 Camp

Last week the year eights went to Kauaeranga Valley Christian Camp. The camp was focussed on leadership and helped us to step up and become more confident.

We had a mixture of camp activities like go karts and air rifles, as well as workshops around leadership values. We first practiced 'following the leader' and working as a team, before we learnt about becoming leaders ourselves. We considered the things that we say (first to ourselves, then towards others) and things that we do to lead effectively.

We used the metaphor of the awhi rito - when we are young we are the centre of the awhi rito, with our teachers, families and caregivers looking after us as the outer leaves. As we grow older, take more responsibility and lead we move further away from the centre. 

Throughout the week more and more students stepped up to show their leadership. It was amazing to see everyones confidence grow and we all learnt something new about each other.

Rotten Romans

This week room 4 have been learning about the different continents. We have started with a 'visit' to Rome 4, or ancient Rome. This gave us an example of how architecture, language and people moved around Europe. We learnt some interesting facts like:

• The Romans conquered many countries around the Mediterranean sea.
• The Romans kept dogs as pets
• They used to wash their clothes in urine,
• There are still Roman roads and architecture that we can see today!

We also learnt that Latin developed into the romance languages like French, Spanish and Italian! So we can still see some of the influences of the Romans 2000 years later - we thought this was pretty cool.
As there have been hundreds of wars in Europe, we looked at how different empires had conquered different places throughout history. We looked at how the Roman army were able to invade so many countries - they had a rigorous training scheme and some great formations. Check out our Testudo!