Inferring Character Traits

This week we made slinky people.  They represented a character from a book we are reading or a book we have read.  A lot of us looked at characters from the book we are reading in class, Tales of the Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume.  

We know that the author doesn't always use words to describe the character, but we can look at what the character says, what the character does, and how the character feels to infer the character's traits.  Here are some of our slinky people.  We listed the character traits on the front and provided evidence from the text on the back.  

Solar Panels

Recently we have been talking more about solar panels.  Here is some information that Mrs Cavanagh a while back.

Our solar panels have now been up for almost 6 months.  We finally have the "Splash Monitoring" system properly installed so that you can see what sort of energy we are generating at any one time.  If you're interested in taking a look, you can visit our site at:

Maungaraki School Solar Panel Monitoring

I particularly like the graphic in the bottom right where it gives comparisons to the cumulative energy we have generated… At the time that I wrote this post, we had generated 5125KWh (Kilo Watt Hours) of electricity since the panels went up, this is the same as:

• boiling 215 thousand cups of tea
• making 273 thousand pieces of toast
• driving a car 6ooo Kilometers
• powering a house (for 3 people) for 25 weeks
• preventing the release of 2.7 tons of CO2 into our atmosphere

WOW!  That's a lot of electricity!  It's great to see the panels are doing their job so efficiently.  I know lots of the classes are studying energy sustainability this term - so hopefully this new monitoring system will help us all learn more about solar power.

Renewable Resource with Room 9

We were so lucky to have Room 9 students over this afternoon to share their renewable resource books with us.  We learnt so much about wind, water, solar, and geothermal energy.  We really enjoyed our time with Room 9 and decided that next time we meet Room 7 is going to teach Room 9 about something we've been learning.

Character Traits

Today we began learning about character traits.  We know that we can determine a character's traits by looking at what the character says, what the character does, and how the character feels.  Before looking at traits of characters in books, we looked at our own character traits.  We listed four traits to describe ourselves and then provided evidence (what we say, do, or feel) of each trait on the back.

Check us out!

Fossil Fuels

This afternoon we spent time looking at some fossil fuels pictures, including pictures of factories, oil spills, and mining locations.  Here are some of the words that came to our minds while we did this.  We made a Wordle with the words. - Room 7

The Origin of Fossil Fuels

In class we have been talking about fossil fuels.  This week we've conducted an experiment to discover the origin of fossil fuels.  Here's what we did.

Here is a description of what the experiment looked like on the first day.  
There is a piece of white bread with two lolly dinosaurs on top.  Next, there is a piece of grain bread with two lolly dinosaurs on top.  Next, there is a piece of wheat bread on top.  There are a few heavy books on top of everything.  We are trying to squeeze it down and see what happens.  The dinosaurs are the fossils.  The bread is the sand and stone that got piled on top of the fossils.

Here are some photos of us creating our experiments on the first day.

On the third and fourth days we inspected our experiments and went mining with straws.  Here are some of the things we noticed:

* The bread is getting harder.

* The lollies are getting softer, like jam.

* It is hard to mine for the fossil fuels.

* The bread is squeezed together and is thin like paper.

Here are some photos of our mining.

We are looking forward to checking out the experiments again after the weekend.