High Impact - Explaining Force

This is an example of what our "High Impact" blog posts should look like:

FORCE

Force is the amount of energy needed to move an object from a state of rest to one of motion. That is, if I want to move an object that is standing still I need to add some force to it.

We see this when we kick a football. The ball might be sitting on the ground, but the force from kicking it pushes it away from me. The greater the force (i.e. the harder I kick the ball) the faster it accelerates away from me.

Kete: High Impact

In our High Impact Kete we are learning about the physical world and how forces and motion impact on our daily lives.


One of the key contexts we are using for this learning is marble runs. We are learning about potential and kinetic energy, and we are exploring how gravity, friction, wind resistance and centrifugal force all impact on our marble runs.

On Friday 5 May we undertook our first task - to see the longest time we could keep our marbles

in motion.

Here are some photos of our constructions:

                           The team who won the first challenge
                           (at 24.9 seconds) was Team 5:

                           Loishane, Deianira, Jade, Shonte and Nadia.


 Here is a video of their prize-winning marble run in action:

In this digital world it is great to see the girls making good use of books in their learning 😀

Class Treaty 2017

At the beginning of Term 1, as part of our "We Are Hornby" kete, we looked at the Hornby High School values of:
                     Commitment
                     Achievement
                     Resilience
                     Respect

As we had just celebrated Waitangi Day, we decided to write our own Class Treaty to describe how we will demonstrate these values. This is the contents of our Treaty, which we all signed:

We also discussed the Treaty of Waitangi and the problems that have occurred over the years because both parties to the Treaty had different interpretations of the documents they signed. The wording was not clear.

This showed us that we need to make our own writing really clear so that when people read what we have written they understand what we are trying to say. We need to write with our readers in mind.

Haere Mai 2017

This is the first post on this blog for 2017. A special welcome goes to the 32 students in 8Mt and their families and whanau. I have been getting to know the students a bit better over the past three weeks, and 2017 looks set to be a great year!

I have updated the links to student blogs at the right of this blog. This will take readers to the learning blogs of each student in 8Mt. Over the year we will be posting evidence of our learning, and we welcome comments from our friends, family and whanau.

Making our own kites

We only have one more Kete lesson to finish making our kites before the Festival of the Arts presentation on Thursday. Here are some pictures from our work today:

           This is the large bird kite,
           based on the smaller kite
           Mr Mitchell brought along.

      This is the traditional English kite made
      with a long tail to help stability in a
      strong wind.

           This is a creative kite made
           of black polythene sheet on
           a bamboo frame. We added
           a face to the kite to give it
           character.

      This is the frame for a large
      manu taratahi, a type of
      Maori kite. We will be
     adding a wall of fluteboard
     panels on Thursday.

          This is a "spider-web"
          framed kite which gives
          us an octagonal shape. It
          will be decorated on
          Thursday.

      This is a smaller manu
      taratahi which has panels
      made of old venetian
      blinds attached instead
      of traditional materials
      of raupo leaves.

           Here we are attaching the
           venetian blind panels to our
           manu taratahi.

      This kite has an
      unconventional frame
      which adds strength
      when flying.

      We will finish decorating
      this kite on Thursday.




We will also be adding string to our kites on Thursday and seeing how well they fly.