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=__**Welcome to The Island 2013!**__=

=__**Term 1**__= =**A HUGE THA****NKS** **to all of you parents** **for helping the children get ready for camp! We had a wonderful time and were able to build our sense of team and personal responsibility through fun activities and new experiences. We'd also like to thank our parent helpers, without you it would in no way be possible, and you really went the extra mile to support us all and make it a fun-filled time. We feel very lucky to have such amazing parents in The Island! Thank you all SO much!**= =**We** **have had a very busy** **start to the year! We were so pleased to see all our wonderful year 4's and their families come back looking refreshed, as well as our new year 3's who are so eager to join our Island community.**= =**We are very pleased to welcome Miss Clark(Kirsten) into The Island this year and hope that you have all had the opportunity to meet her and have a chat. We are all set for a successful and fun-filled year! Enjoy!**=

Term 4 2012
The Island is doing really well selling their books. We would like to publicly thanks Konica Minolta and Agility Logistics for their support and sponsorship. Tiana and Olivia went to the Leisure Centre and sold books to the parents. We are also getting lots of donations because of the cyclone that has caused widespread damage in Samoa, including around Apia, where Vailima School is. We hope that they are ok. We are going to ship over more supplies in February using the money from the books and donations. Thanks to all the kind people that are supporting us! Here we are selling our books at The Warehouse. Well done Erin and Lily! Here we are selling our books at the Plaza!
 * Week 10 **

Here we are selling at the Gulf Harbour Markets.


 * Bubbles anyone!? **
 * Week 9 **

We had lots of packaging prototypes and in the end we put lots ideas together into one design. Here are all the different people who had ideas that we used. Diagram by Zoe.
 * Week 8 **

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Thanks to everyone who attended the book launch. We had a wonderful turn out. It was great to have our books all ready and we sold lots!

The final packaging design was on display and worked really well.

A special thanks to all the parents who supplied food!

Here are our authors signing their books!

Matt had the idea of a window and Caitlin had a really sturdy design!
 * Week 7 **

We loved Noah's Bella box with shaggy ears and Liberty's handle was great!

Here are Ellie, Anastascia and Joseph's designs.

We have had some fantastic packaging ideas and the class have had to carefully follow a technology process to develop their ideas.

Here is our book launch invitation. We would LOVE to see you there.

Ten books and twelve authors!

Here are the measurements for the readers. This will help you with your packaging designs. Remember that you are making packaging for a 3D shape. That is length, width and depth!
 * Week 6 **

We are very excited to be creating a series of stickers to go with our readers. The printers are sending us proofs tomorrow so that's great! Hopefully they will look great!

Check out the covers on our new set of readers! We had a great time checking out the eclipse this week. The light went very strange and it got quite cold. Luckily we had Louis there to share his special eclipse glasses! (Photo taken with iPod!)
 * Week 5 **

Very exciting news, our next five readers have just done to the printer. They are great new titiles '1,2,3...', 'Splish, Splash, Splosh', 'What's For Lunch?', 'Count on Us' and 'Boo'. We can't wait to see what they look like. Here are our We are also printing special character stickers!

We had a 'Red Day' to raise money for the Manly Fire Service rapid response vehicle.

media type="youtube" key="Gs6sNVQ4HQk?rel=0" height="315" width="560"

media type="youtube" key="dIoanQ2HXdw?rel=0" height="315" width="560" Here we are working away with our packaging inquiry!


 * Week 4 **

The banana split was great fun. Four hundred kids eating ice cream! We made over $13 000 and read 606 546 pages!

We had a great day at athletic, Congratulations to everyone who competed.

We have had an interesting time immersing ourselves in packaging. We asked some important questions. What packaging do we like? How does it work? What a is a net? How do you follow instructions? What things stick together well? How to build something to stand up? What are 3D shapes and how many faces, edges and corners do they have?

All of this knowledge is to help us design our own packaging for our books. Look out for our book launch in week 7 or 8!

Our final school total for pages read was 606 546. Isn't that amazing! We did such a lot of reading! Look out for a story in the local newspaper when we have our whole school banana split to celebrate our achievement.
 * Readathon **

This week we are really starting to think about packaging and our book launch.
 * Week 3 **



We had a great final day of reading! The parade was great fun!


 * Week 2 **

Here's our new school total!

What a wonderful week of reading! This week it was Mrs Millington's turn and her and Mr Van Zyl did a wonderful job!

Back to school and we are we are straight into the reading. We have read 154 815 pages already as a school! There has been lots of maths adding up our totals. What big totals we have. Keep that reading up!
 * Week 1 **

We have had a real fun week of reading. Reading by ourselves, reading with buddies, reading in groups, and being read to.



Here is Sir Readalot dropping off our supply of new books to the class. It was very exciting to get them.



Mr Brown read to the whole school in the Island. Boy, it was a squeeze to fit everyone in.



Our Basketballers had a great session with the Breakers. They came back buzzing with excitiment!

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Check out the Breakers action.

Great excitement. Mrs Millington had returned from Samoa where she delivered our books! Here is Mrs Millington talking to Aunty Karamellie who is organising the transport of our boxes once they get to Samoa.

Touching down in Samoa.


 * 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!

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
 * Incoming BOOKS!!! **

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

media type="youtube" key="uGhwlLFkzFA?rel=0" height="315" width="560" 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 [| http://www.funda.co.nz/gulf-harbour-school/the-great-stick-your-head-in-a-book-athon]

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.
 * Week 9 **

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.

media type="youtube" key="_QsmuMGkIlA?rel=0" height="315" width="420" Support Red Nose Day ! 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!
 * Week 6 **
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This is a Venn Diagram we used to help us figure out what makes a great reader.


 * Week 5 **

media type="youtube" key="1Qyw8J9g0JY" height="315" width="560" 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.

Filling out illustration think charts. What makes a good reader?
 * We had an immersion day on Monday where we had 10 different stations to learn all about readers! **
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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.
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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!

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.
 * Bugsy Malone 2012 **

**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

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... 
 * Week 1 **