Manaiakalani Film Festival- Magic Student's

Mrs Richardson gave us an essay that was way too hard. She kept us in for morning tea so we couldn't go out and play. She is so mean that we decided to turn her into a toad. Luckily for us, Mrs R had taught us how to write spells for turning people into toads. We had all the ingredients and set to work.
Our spell worked. Mrs Richardson was a toad but.......... Tuporo was now the teacher! Oh no! He soon found out that it was hard work being a teacher and wanted Mrs Richardson back. The potion was still in the classroom... Fingers crossed it would turn everything back to normal.... 
SPS Richardson MagicStudents from Manaiakalani Film Festival on Vimeo.

What tense?

WALT use the right tense in our recount. This is our group sorting all the different tenses into groups. We know that my changing the verb we can change the tense of the word. In a recount we will use the past tense because our event has already happened.

Tricky Mrs Richardson

WALT read and follow instructions.

It was late in the afternoon and Mrs R gave us a task. We had to follow the instruction and Mrs R said that there was a trick. She even said that if we got all the instructions right she would give us $20. We were only allowed 10mins to complete all our instructions and there were some really hard ones. We all got to work. All of us wanted that $20!

It was really disappointing that none of us finished even half of the tasks before the time was up. We complained that it was impossible!

Then..... Mrs R read the instructions to us while we listened...... As it turns out.... we missed the first instruction..... the most important one.

It said to read all the instructions carefully before starting. The last instruction was forget the instructions just put your name on the sheet and hand it into your teacher!


..... She tricked us!

.......But, we did learn that we have to read carefully and look at every instruction.

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.