Murky Mud to Chrystal Clear

We have been talking about the Waikato River and how we can use it. We thought the most important way people use the River is to drink from it. We know the Waikato River is really dirty. We would not drink from the river because we may end up in the hospital. We were thinking about ways it could be cleaned. We thought that if we added clean water to the dirty water it would become clean again. We did an experiment. We put coffee and glitter into a cup of clean water. Then we added clean water to see if it would be all clean. It was still dirty but there was more water in our cup. We had to keep thinking...... We came up with an idea that we could use a machine that had tiny holes so the water could get through but the dirt would get stuck. Mrs Richardson gave use a filter that we used to strain our dirty water. A filter is like a bag with tiny holes in it. When we strained our dirty water threw the filter, the glitter got stuck but, the water was still brown from the coffee. The water was lighter than before. We came to the conclusion that you could clean the water from the Waikato River using a huge filter.

Picture Perfect

WALT brainstorm how the Waikato River can be used. This is our cool brainstorm we created using pictures of all the ways the Waikato River could possibly be used.

Using the Atlas

We are learning about the Waikato River. Most of us didn’t really know where the Waikato River was so Mrs Richardson taught us how to use an Atlas. We looked at the key (or symbols) for different things like a river, which was a blue squiggly line. Towns were black circles and road were red lines. We found the Waikato River in the North Island of New Zealand. We found that the Waikato River starts with many small streams on the eastern slopes of Mount Ruapehu. It empties into the Tasman Sea and empties into Lake Taupo. The River has many lakes that join onto it and that it passes through many towns such as Cambridge, Hamilton, and Ngaruawahia. It is joined by, the Waipa River, at Ngaruawahia. It then flows north through the Taupiri Gorge to enter the lower Waikato region. It goes further north at Huntly and then Meremere, where the Whangamarino and Maramarua Rivers join it. From Mercer, where the Mangatawhiri River joins it, the Waikato flows west and southwest. Just before its mouth at Port Waikato, the Araroa River joins from the north. There are lots of small islands that are located in the long, thin part of the river as it passes through swampy land between Meremere and the coast, the largest Island is Motutieke Island.

A Pop -Up Card for Mum!

We have been learning about the structure of instructional writing Since it is Mother’s Day on Sunday, Mrs Richardson said we could make our Mums a pop up card. We were really excited, but…. There was a catch. We had to write and follow our own instructions. We got given some draft paper and some ideas of how to make things pop up. We tried lots of ways and as a class wrote out how we could do it. We had to start with a title, then add in what materials we would need, (in order of use) then finally add our method. A method are the instructions or, ‘what you do’ The next day we were so excited to start making our cards, but…. There was another catch! Mrs Richardson had cut up all our instructions. We had to put them in order again. When we thought we had them in order, we could use them to start making our cards. It was hard to stop and follow the instructions when we thought we knew what the next step was, but we had to make sure we followed the instructions. Mrs Richardson thinks we did a really good job. Here are some pictures of our work.

What We Want to Know!

This term we are going to be learning all about the Waikato River. Mrs Richardson asked us what we knew about the River. At first we didn’t know very much at all. Then Mrs Richardson gave us an activity to do where we had to write on the outside of the piece of paper all the things about the words ‘Waikato’ and ‘River’ which turned out to be quite a lot. After we talked about our ideas we all had a space on the paper to write down the things that we didn’t know. We had lots of them! We only had four minutes to get all our thinking down. We had lots of questions on our pages. We had to look through them and choose which ones we would like to answer in our Topic study. We had to think really had because we didn’t want to ask closed questions otherwise our topic study would be over really quickly! These are our picture frames showing all the things we know about the Waikato River. All the things we don’t know and our key question we would like to find out. Stay tuned to see if we answer all our questions. These are our picture frames.