Term+3

=** Term 3 **=


 * Week 11 **



Here is Mrs Millington's bag ready to take to Samoa and there are those wonderful readers ready to go to Samoa!!



Off we go to deliver the boxes to be shipped to Samoa! Masina was wonderful and organised the shipping. She has been so generous with her time and energy. Here we are with our documents she did for us. Unfortunately when we got to the freight company Tappers, they wouldn't let the students out of the car for safety reasons. Luckily they still got to see all the action.



Special thanks to Barry for getting the boxes down to Onehunga in his ute.

Here are the printed books too that went with Mrs Millington on the plane.

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** Week 10 **




Here are our books. Five new titles from the Island!




 * Incoming BOOKS!!! **

Hooray!!! Our first books have been printed! We are so excited about them going to Vailiama School in Samoa. We chose five readers to go, here are their titles:

Bugwugs Hungry, The storm, Let’s Build a House and Lets Jump. Giovanna said “They look like real readers!” We think they look great too!

By Ellie and Zoe



This week we have been making maps for homework. They had to show the journey of our boxes to Samoa. Here are Tori and Zoe's maps.



Here we are with Sir Readalot. We are working at getting as many sponsors as we can.

We have sent our readers off to the printers now and are waiting for our test copies to some back.

Yay!! The calendar art is coming. Our class is doing calendar art based on our characters. We are taking our backgrounds and using them to create our art.

By Anastascia and Seb

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We are also gearing up for the Readathon. We want to get as many sponsors as we can. You can sponsor students on their forms or online. Check out the video of Sir Readalot's arrival.

Follow this link for readathon forms

http://sirreadalot.wikispaces.com/home

Online Sponsorship

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 * Week 9 **



We have been getting our boxes ready to ship to Samoa. Unfortunately the boat that they were going on will now not be stopping in Samoa. We will have to wait for the next boat! It has been great to see things arriving this week. We have quite a load of boxes sitting in the middle of our room! Thanks so much for all the donations. There is some wonderful stuff that Vailima School will really appreciate.



We have been making some decorations for the boxes going to Samoa! We thought it would be fun to have the boxes arrive with our characters on them. We also had a visit from Stu and it was really exciting to show him our creations. He liked our stories but gave us some good feedback. (Being a real Author/ Illustrator)



We have been trying to make some decisions about the look of our covers. What colours, fonts and layout do we want for our series? You will soon see!



As we are making a series of books, we have been looking at what publishers do to make books look like like a series. They use certain fonts, colours and layout.

** Week 8 **


Here are five books (and six authors) we are publishing first and sending to Samoa.

We have a deadline coming up so we are working hard to get them ready!





Download a draft copy of our first reader! What do you think? What changes do we need to make?





What a fantastic surprise on Friday when 2500 exercise books arrived in our classroom!!

Special thanks to Masina Boatwright who got the exercise books as well as hundreds pencils to send to Samoa. She has been amazing!







We had a great time last Friday. Our yellow day was for fund raising for the Cancer Society.

WEEK 7
Wow it’s been a big and 'full on' week for us. We have been working really hard on our readers. We have been creating them on Keynote and getting them ready to send to the printer.



We chose the colours for the characters.

We wanted to have colours that suited the characters.



The illustrations group started to experiment drawing the characters on the computers. We used Keynote and realised that the characters had to look the same in each page and each book. Using the computer rather than drawing meant we could keep things the same.



We also experimented with water colour paints and have used them to colour our characters.

We did that by photographing our paintings and and then filling the characters with the coloured photos in Keynote.



Backgrounds have also been a big focus and we are doing these with water colours too. We wanted to keep them simple so the focus was on a characters.

We choose the first top five stories to go to Samoa Mrs Millington will take them in the first week of the holidays. We hope Vailima school will enjoy our made readers. We want to say a big thank you to all the parents who helped us go through our big journey to get these really awesome readers to get to Samoa.

By Anastascia.



This week we are on a mission to discover what makes a great illustration.



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Support Red Nose Day !


 * Week 6 **


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Here we are testing our readers on the visiting Japanese students. They seemed to really enjoy them. We have worked hard this week on writing them. We are finding out that writing readers is harder then you think!



This is a Venn Diagram we used to help us figure out what makes a great reader.


 * Week 5 **

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Stu Duval a professional artist came in to help make our characters better and easier to draw. Here are all six of them... Bug Wug, Mandy, Mango, Bubbles, Bella and Clipper.



We turned our six characters into puppets to help create idea’s for our readers. We started to practise making readers for more idea’s.



Our progress is going great so far. We have chosen our six favourite characters for our readers by a class vote after everyone shared their ideas.

** Term 3 Week 4 **


If we are going to make readers for the Samoan school Vailima we need to answer this very important question. What makes a great reader? We have got lots of work to find out!



We have called this term 'Mission Koha Samoa'!



Here is Vailima school.


 * We had an immersion day on Monday where we had 10 different stations to learn all about readers! **


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Filling out illustration think charts. What makes a good reader?


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How many words do readers have?


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Thinking about our journey.


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We had lots to do. Finding out what words are used in readers. What our audience is like.


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Characters drawn for homework. Working on our own illustrations.



We looked at different readers and our most popular one was 'Dog'. The class loved the illustrations and story.

Week 3


We had a fantastic session with our new teacher Miss Mattushek. She has came back to New Zealand after a year of teaching in Samoa. While she was there she visited a school that didn't have many things for learning. They didn't have any readers (sets of simple reading books) for the students! We had a great idea! We thought, wouldn't it be cool to make some readers for the school. They learn English at school so we could write them in our own language. After hearing all about volunteers we decided we could volunteer our time to make these books and help the school in Samoa.



We had a fantastic talk from Mrs Rackham about volunteering to help in a school in Nicaragua. It's amazing how little some schools have.


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Nicaragua. Some children are not as lucky as us and have very little in their schools.

Here is the school from the inside and outside.



** Rudi’s visit **



Rudi is a volunteer fireman. He has come to our class to talk about being a volunteer fireman. Did you know that all of the fireman at Manly are volunteer fireman? There are 1600 paid Fireman in New Zealand.But there are 8000 volunteer Fireman!

Louis and I were videoing the whole thing. “Can you put on your suit?” someone asked. “Maybe” Rudi replied. He put on his fire suit pants and boots on first. “This can protect you in a fire” Rudi said. “ Some fireman feel comfortable but it is pretty hot if you are working.” Then he took it off and started putting on his road suit.

“So say that there was a fire in Manly. They would have to rely on a brigade farther if there were no volunteers” Rudi explained. We really appreciate Rudi’s visit and the commitment and skill he has that keeps us safe.

By Nathan



Special thanks to Jack for the gift of mandarins!


 * Bugsy Malone 2012 **



Did you go to Bugsy Malone? It was great!It was on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We went on Tuesday. It was AWSOME! Guns Firing, ladies dancing, what a PRODUCTION! Fat Sam was so good at acting. On Monday Blousy Brown forgot to bring her baseball bat! On Tuesday they didn’t do one mistake. I wonder how it went on Wednesday. I bet it was great!

Well done to the Year 7s!

By Zoe

Photos of the production are on the school website in the 'Check This Out' blog.

**Week 2 **

CROSS COUNTRY 2012
Cross Country was awesome! We had heaps of fun at Shakespear Park. Everyone had a really, really good time running. They also enjoyed congratulating their friends and playing games. The Blue Tiki’s came second overall. If any parents came they would know that we had to step through sheep poo and pee...squelching in between our toes. It was a horrible feeling. We all had a great and awesome time at the Cross Country!!!!!



By Anastascia.


 * Nicky Gumbrell's Visit **

Nicky Gumbrell came to visit us and talk about volunteering. Volunteering means that someone does something for nothing. This is what she talked about. She helps people read with dogs. Did you know that the dogs make them relaxed and read better? Nicky has a dog called Golly.

Golly is really friendly and trained well. Nicky volunteers to help in the world. She is very friendly. She tries to make everyone’s life better. Volunteering makes your life feel better.

Some time you might try being a volunteer. Nicky loves animals. Nicky enjoys helping. Nicky is very helpful and kind. Nicky was very nice to us. The classes that came and heard about Nicky were Rooms 15,16 and 23.

By Caitlin and Ellie


 * Week 1 **

Welcome back to school everyone!

This term is called 'The Art of Giving' What does it mean to be a volunteer?

Click on the link below to hear about your special mission...



We have emailed the latest newsletter out. If you did not receive it, and would like to receive it let us know (by email!) Here is the newletter below.





Do you like drawing? Try some of these online drawing websites.

We are out training again for the Cross Country. Remember that it is on Tuesday 24 July. Make sure that you have filled in the permission slip. It's always great to see everyone down at Shakespear Park having a go! This year we are trying to wear our team colours. As the Blue Tiki team we will be wearing blue .



This year the Year 7s are performing the musical 'Bugsy Malone' at the Whangaparaoa College Auditorium. We would like to support them as a class and go to the Tuesday night performance (7:00pm 31 July). There has been a notice go home about it so please book tickets. Both Mr Brown and Mrs Millington will be there Tuesday and we thought it would be fun to come in costume if you can!!




 * Making Our Tapa Designs **


 * 1) First we looked at traditional tapa designs from the polynesian islands like Samoa Rarotonga . We found they were symmetrical. They are made with Mulberry trees and beaten with a club into cloth. They are natural colours like brown, black, tan and redish brown.
 * 2) We copied the traditional tapa designs using crayon and indian ink.
 * 3) Next we made our own tapa with symbols of ourselves like fish hooks, rugby balls, mountains, and trees.
 * 4) We also made class tapas and we decided to use blue ,black and white. Everyone had a different tapa design but we had all the same colours. We are the same class but different people.
 * 5) Finally we decided to do fluorescent tapas for the Blue Tiki Lounge


 * Week 1 **

Hello eGGHHJHFRveryone Mr Brown here! Thanks SO much for the emails. It really made my day to hear from you. Now to answer some questions. I am in Room 209 at the moment. My favourite ride was 'Splash Mountain' at Disneyland and yes, Mr Petrie does snore sometimes!!!!

Right now we are in San Francisco. It's a nice city. We are talking to the people at Apple computers for two day which is really interesting. They have lots of cool apps that you can use on the iPad. Some really good ones for learning. Today everyone got an iPad to use (not to keep) and there was no paper used. I have made you a little movie on an app called 'Explain Everthing'