Remembering 2018

Remember poems were revisited - we had a fun look back on our year ...

Speeches

The school speech competition was held in Week 3, prior to this we had our class and Syndicate finals to determine who would present their speeches in the Year 7 finals. Bailey, Kylah, and Jo represented Room 10.
Jo gave an amazing persuasive speech and was the Year 7 winner. Kylah's was announced Best Informative speech.

and Hyrum just made us laugh...

Pepeha

During Te Wiki O Te Reo Maori the class prepared their pepeha - these were delivered when we were at Papa O Te Aroha Marae last month. They've also recorded them: Copy the link to hear them.

 https://flipgrid.com/cc0a8a0d

Community Gardens Term 4

Term 4 saw the gardening group learning a lot about weeding and planting seedlings, Robyn Wolfe continued to show infinite patience and shared her extensive knowledge of plants and weeds with the group. 

A big thanks to Robyn and Jared from Raukawa, for making it possible for the group to learn about growing your own vegetables:

 

Thanks McDonalds

McDonalds Tokoroa have sponsored our school for the past 20 years, they generously sponsor a weekly free Big Mac for one child per class - known at Tokoroa Intermediate as the McDonalds Award. So 11 burgers per week for 40 weeks...
Tokoroa Intermediate appreciates this so each class has written  thank you letters to Mr and Mrs Byrne the owners to show our appreciation - here are Room 10's:

What did we learn and enjoy about our stay at Papa?

The boys practised their 'popping manu" skills

Painting the Fence at Papa O Te Aroha 2018

November 19- 21 saw Room 10 at Papa O Te Aroha for the annual Marae visit. This year's stay was a little longer as it had been decided the class would paint the front fence. Papa O Te Aroha Marae has been a place of special memories for many Room 10 classes over the years, so it was good to be able to give something back to the marae.
 Yr's painters and Bunnings Tokoroa kindly donated paint brushes, School kits SVA pack contained a $50 New World voucher that was spent on lollies to provide energy, and with some parent help and the forecast thunderstorms holding off until later in the day we got it done.

Here's the finished results. Papa O Te Aroha's front fence looks great!

Room 10's hard at work:

Creating imaginary insects

After learning about classification in the animal world, and more specifically identifying spiders and insects by their features, the class wrote reports describing 'imaginary insects' they had discovered...

Community Gardens 2

Our gardening adventures made the local paper:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/south-waikato-news/106957231/students-get-green-fingered-with-gardening-lessons?cid=app-iPhone

Narrative writing

The class have been writing narratives, they were challenged to include narrative features - an orientation, a complication and a resolution, to use descriptive detail, some literary devices and the correct use of speech.

These were published using Book Creator.

Here is some of their completed work, click on the links to read the books created:

The Tokoroa Community Gardens

This term some of the class have been fortunate enough to be involved in a project between Raukawa and the Tokoroa Community Gardens, thanks to Jared Kennedy the Health Promotions Coordinator and Robyn Wolfe who works tirelessly at the gardens and has a wealth of gardening knowledge.

Every Friday they are taken down to the gardens by Jared and there under the expert tuition of Robyn, they are learning to grow vegetables - later in the year they will learn to use these vegetables in cooking lessons... 
Lots of new skills learnt: - starting with clearing and fertilising a patch of land, planting seeds and seedlings, discovering stinging nettle does sting and how to treat if you do have a close encounter with a stinging nettle, rake safety and last Friday - finding out what Yacon is and tasting it. 
All are shown below: 

Great Opening Sentences

The class are going to be writing narratives - so first up; how do author's hook their readers in?
During our visit to the Information Centre, we looked at  the opening sentences in a variety of books:

A great site to help with your Maths skills

Today I was contacted by the makers of this site - some great resources here to help improve your maths skills and understanding at home:
Especially useful for different ways to practice the speed and accuracy of your basic facts recall.

https://www.dadsworksheets.com/worksheets.html

The Anzac Competition

Every year at Tokoroa Intermediate there is a competition for the Anzac Trophy, it is awarded to the student who submits a piece of work that best demonstrates an understanding of events the Anzacs took part in during WW1.
 Hannah not only created a realistic Gallipoli character with links back to her South African origins, and wrote a great Remember poem from the point of view of a Nurse on a hospital ship at Gallipoli, but she also carried out a great Inquiry into a real Anzac soldier as part of our Walking with an Anzac study. She started with an artefact  and her subsequent research told the story that accompanied the artefact - in this case, a series of telegrams.
Her winning entry:

Remember Gallipoli Poems

To finish our Anzac study the class wrote Remember Poems:

Recipes from Ua Pou and Room 10

Last week our epals in Ua Pou in the Marquesa Islands sent us some recipes - food they like to eat. This week the class created  'recipe slides' to share with them. 
They were asked to find recipes for food they eat at home, food that they enjoy, food that represents their cultures, foods that are unique to NZ - we included some Pacific Island recipes so our epals can find similarities with theirs: 





We also took some pictures of where you get coconuts and fish in Tokoroa. 

The Annual Anzac Soldiers Lunch

Last Monday the class had an Anzac soldiers lunch. Bully beef, cheese, jam and hard tack 'soldiers' biscuits. This was followed by a treat - fruit cake (this was a new experience for many in the class). So why did the class get to eat the rations of 1915? So they can get a better understanding of the food Anzac soldiers ate at Gallipoli.

Here's what the soldiers thought of their food:

So what did the class think of the food they ate?

Writing descriptions of 'WW1 soldiers and nurses'

In Social Studies, and Reading the class have been learning about World War 1 and some of the New Zealanders who went to fight at Gallipoli and the Western Front, this knowledge was used to create some Soldiers and Nurses who have just 'joined up'... 

Anzac Biscuits

As part of our Anzac study, the class made Anzac Biscuits.
In pairs, they had to find an Anzac biscuit recipe, compare the ingredients with the other recipes brought in, and reduce the quantities of the ingredients ( 13 batches of 24 -30 biscuits was too much for the Food Tech'   room ovens to cope with!).

When making their biscuits they had to measure quantities carefully and follow the method in the recipe. There were some interesting results :

Brian Falkner visited.

Brian Falkner a well known NZ author spent the day at the school recently- he worked with groups of our more capable writers and spoke to the school at Assembly. He’s a seriously nice guy, a great author and those lucky enough to spend time with him today learnt lots.

Andrew from the Room 10 2017 class, hosted Assembly and introduced Brian to the school, he also wrote a report for the school newsletter:

Our Time With Brian Falkner

 On 11 May, the extension language groups of Tokoroa Intermediate  
 had the rare opportunity to work a best- selling author. This   talented man is named Brian Falkner, his most famous work being ‘The Tomorrow Code’. He began his lesson by telling us about his  
 passion to write and read books, it was always a dream of Brian’s 
 to have his name on his very own book in a library, to achieve this
 Brian had to push through with the pure power of tenacity for three
 decades in order to be noticed by a publisher and finally achieve
 his lifelong dream. One of the many, many things we learned while 
 Brian taught us was the actual concept of a story. We were taught   that in order to make a story immersive was to use emotions of the   reader. Mr Falkner also spoke to the school assembly.

 A big thanks to our school librarian Mrs Van Der Putten for   arranging for this author to come and spend the day at Tokoroa 
 Intermediate.

 Andrew W 

Our School Murals

Last week, Room 10's B Tech Arts group were lucky enough to get to show the local newspaper reporter  our new school murals: