Tech @ Tamaki College (Pewter Work)

This week at Tech, the Year 8's continued planning our ideas for the pewter cast. After making a few changes and checking with Mr. Grundy myself, all of my ideas have been confirmed and now I have to choose only ONE to do. I'm leaning towards one for my mom as her birthday is coming quite soon. A few people have already started the beginning of their process.

Kupe & Captain James Cook's Journey to Aoteroa (MAP)

This week for Inquiry we are learning about explorers and adventurers. So a group of us collaboratively created a map that showed the journey of Kupe’s and Captain James Cook’s discovery of New Zealand. This took three of us, Haylee, Fau and Victoria to research about Kupe and the others Chris, Sulia, and Giovanni working on James Cook. We were able to locate where their Journey began and finished, and also making it interactive.x

Summer Learning Journey 2020

                

Over this summer holiday, the Summer Learning Journey team has held another year of the programme. This was really exciting, because it's a chance for schools all around New Zealand to help and even improve in their learning over the break. And we can possibly win a prize for coming 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place! This is my 4th or 3rd time participating, and I proudly placed 2nd! The 1st place prize was a Nintendo switch, so it was big competition. Alex won it though, while Sakina came 3rd. It was another great year of participating and it's a great accomplishment and motivation for myself, and a strong start to the beginning of the year. Congratulations to those who participated and won a prize or certificate at the assembly!

Tech Reflection

This week for tech we continued Pewter work with Mr. Grundy at Tamaki College. We've all created workbooks to plan out and fill out some information about our designs for the cast. Everyone has made at least a list of 4 people that we might consider gifting our pendant too. I'm personally still finding my silhouettes, and need to choose one person that I'll be making this for.

Treaty of Waiting - Collaborative Summary

Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a very important time in New Zealand history. In 1860, representatives from the British Crown and Maori Chiefs signed a treaty of agreement, to let the Maori have ownership over their land and property. Partnership, Participation, Protection (or the 3 P's) were the underlining principles under the treaty. They got the treaty to be signed by over 500 Maori chiefs.

 

In reading we looked at the Treaty of Waitangi, and explored what really happened in our history/past. In small collaborative groups, we read something that explained the story and summarized our understanding. I worked with Florence, Sakina, Haylee, Taheesha, Miiana, and Ellenora. The highlighted words in our summary above, are the keywords we used from our vocabulary list.

Collaborative Explanation - Plastic Pollution

         Why is plastic pollution a problem for our coastlines?

Did you know that over 1,000,000 sea animals lose their lives each year due to the huge amounts of plastic waste in our oceans and coastlines?! Mistaking it for food, the animals will eat the plastic...but as it takes years to break down, it stays trapped in their body and they will eventually die. From our actions, they are forced to suffer and we create a bigger problem for ourselves in the future...How would you feel to be swimming in plastic?

Plastic makes up 90% of the pollution on the ocean’s surface; a large majority of that ends up inside our sea animals or wrapped around their neck, and intoxicating the waters. The plastic we leave lying on pathways and throwing on the street ends up in drains and leads to the sea. About 97 percent of New Zealanders have admission to plastic facilities, but why aren’t we doing anything about it?

Plastic is biodegradable but it takes around 1,000 years to break down based on the type of plastic it is. Plastic NZ says that every New Zealander takes in about 31kgs of plastic packaging a year, but only around 5.8kgs get recycled. “Love Your Coast” is one of the many projects that is taking action by bringing together groups of people to help clean the shores of New Zealand. This project decides to clean the shores of New Zealand as they want the next generation to be cleaner.

We should take action now for a better and healthier future!

For one of our writing sessions, we were practicing planning and writing an explanation for one of our future tests the following week. We were worked collaborative to get a better understanding of the purpose of an explanation and how to write one. Our topic was about plastic pollution, and one of the ways we looked at this was by watching a few videos. Love Your Coast is one of the many projects in New Zealand that is making a change on this huge environmental issue. For this activity I worked with Florence, Haylee and Sakina to create our collaborative explanation.

Tech @ Tamaki College Reflection

This week Friday the year 8’s started their first session of tech at Tamaki College. This term we are working with pewter in  Mr. Grundy’s class. On our first day we looked at a few examples of some of the things we might be creating, and Mr. Grundy also showed us the process of how it is created. Then we started making up some of our own ideas for the pewter.