Homophones

2017 Diary Writing About Mr Tanaka

2017 Diary Entry About Mr Tanaka.

Monday, August 21st.

A few days ago, Mr Tanaka, a japanese teacher came to our school. First he had a little look around for a few days, but then there was this one point where he cooked us some japanese soup at the school kitchen. This soup was called Miso Soup. It was made with Miso something and seaweed. When he was done, he gave the class a cup of miso soup one by one. I for one, thought that it tasted DELICIOUS! At first though, it was a bit hot at first and I wasn’t used to the taste. But soon I got used to the taste and it became easier for my taste buds to say that it was delicious. Ysabella my friend,  only liked the seaweed. Ms Nelson told us to hold onto the cups for a bit then we could throw the cups in the bin. I swear, I could definitely taste that soup again.

Tuesday, August 22nd.

On tuesday, Mr Tanaka showed us a powerpoint of the japanese school that he taught. He told us about the city he lived in. Yokohama. He told us that his school had special shoe lockers and that his school also served the food. It was a short lesson, but it was fun to listen to. His english was improving very fast. After the powerpoint he taught us about japanese characters. He said that there were about more than 1000. We played a matching game about how you needed to guess the japanese characters. There were pictures we could understand and symbols that were in japanese.  We had to guess which photo matched the same japanese symbol. It was such a fun game. I would do it again.

Mary Mackillop Day.

A couple of days ago, me and Ysabella partnered up for Mary Mackillop rotations. We did a kahoot about Mary Mackillop and learnt some new things, we decorated famous Mary Mackillop quotes with glitter and glue, we made a pick a colour pick a word pick a number thing, and we also did a puzzle. It was so fun!

Circuits

Yesterday I partnered up with Ysabella and Nyla to make a power circuit. We did exactly everything we could, we switched around the cables, the led light, but not the batteries. It took us soooo long to figure it out. We did it right, it was just that our batteries were dead. We needed play dough, a hard green type of dough, a power battery with 2 wires, and yeah. Then we started working. After a couple of changes, we finally got the led light to light up on the hard green dough. We were so happy, until we had to pack up.

Coding

A few days ago my class did some coding. Coding is very fun. There are lots of games to play that will increase your knowledge. There's different moves you can do, and there's a certain goal you have to reach to get to the next level. You can move forward, loop, jump forward, rotate to certain angles, and more. I love doing coding, it's fun, free, and there's no inappropriate stuff on it as well. It's easy to access and it even automatically saves your learning on coding. I would definitely recommend Code.org to other people for their learning.

Hiwi The Kiwi

                     The Entertaining Minstrel From Hiwi The Kiwi

Today Hiwi The Kiwi visited St Mary’s. The Minstrel sang some songs at the start while my class was waiting for the other classes to arrive. After that, he taught us some actions and words we should repeat. The first song he included us in was Pukeko Echo.  Sometimes he would say “Put a little sugar in that shake” and we would all do this dance, we had to stand up for this fun song. We clapped while we walked from side to side, and we did the roly poly thing with our hands.

He told us about how to save our fish and our seabirds. He said to pick up a fish with a wet towel so you don’t give the fish sunburn with your bare hands. Sometimes some of the scales can peel off of the fish as well if you touch it with your bare hands. Make sure to put down your hook and bait down in the water as quick as possible as well, because some seabirds are looking for a feed, and they’re gonna go for your bait not knowing there’s a hook, and you might end up catching a seabird, not a fish! He made this song about how you could catch a seabird and not a fish. It goes a little something like “I want a snapper! Not an albatross!”

He was very entertaining. He said to always wear a lifejacket before you go on a boat or a yacht or anything else. And if your dad just leaves the lifejacket at the front of the boat and says he’ll just quickly put it on when there’s a boat emergency, tell him to stop. STOP. STOP! It might be too late to put on the lifejacket, what if it happens so fast that he doesn’t have enough time to put on his lifejacket because it’s already sunk with the boat? He told us about a story. There was a 4 year-old girl who wore a lifejacket, but her dad left it at the front of the boat and didn’t put it on. The boat crashed, and it was too late, he couldn’t survive and get his lifejacket. The little girl stayed in the water for 3 hours until a rescue boat came and found her floating. But her dad died, because he didn’t put on his lifejacket.

Back to the real world, there were some things he said, like Fish for the future, save our seabirds, and he also talked about how we need to save black petrol birds. Hiwi the kiwi is on a mission to save these poor black petrol birds. There are hardly any left! Black petrol birds nest at the Little Great Barrier Islands in Auckland. He said to bring a plastic bag every time you go fishing and pick up every bit of rubbish on the sea so we can save our hungry seabirds from eating those little plastic bottle caps and other plastic things.

One seabird ate a little blue milk bottle cap thinking it was a fish, and then nothing else could go down the seabird’s throat and the seabird couldn’t eat anything anymore because the blue bottle cap blocked the food from going into it’s belly. I felt so bad for the seabirds because they were dying. Okay, enough about seabirds, more about fish!

Make sure to bring a fish measurer on your boat. A fish measurer should tell you how long a normal fish type should be, It should tell you the length of a snapper, a piranha, etc. If the fish is smaller than what it should be, that means it’s a little baby fish, so you throw it back into the water. If the fish is too big, DON’T KEEP IT! Throw it back right now, this instant, don’t wait and take a picture, just throw it back in. Wait, yup, you can wait to take a picture because it’s so big, but after you MUST put it back into the water. If it’s too big, that means the fish is pregnant. So if you take it home, the baby fish inside it’s tummy never got a chance to be born like other fish! So sad. And that’s why you should put that big whopper back into the ocean.

The Minstrel is a great storyteller, and I enjoyed meeting him at the hall at St Mary’s. Oh. My. Lord. I just realized that I have written so much that I must’ve got lost in my mind telling you all about it! You’ve probably stopped reading already, or have you? Oh my lord, 787 words! Yay.

Drumming

Today my class did some drumming. We stuck to one tune, and kept building up to more tunes until we got better and better. One of the beats we worked on was  1.. 2.. 3.. 4.. 5.. 6.. 7.. 8.. And we also worked on keeping in tune as well. Some people were too slow, some were too fast, but some were just right. Oh jeez I just realized I sounded like the Goldilocks story for a little bit. Anyways, The drumming was so fun and I thank Ms Nelson for letting us play the drums with actual drumming sticks.

Pass It

Today someone named Tim from a group called Go4It taught us how to do different types of passes. First he got us warmed up with a game called Pacman. No, not the video game. It was a game where there were only 2 pacmans which opened and closed their arms to show that they were pacmans. All you could run on were lines and if the pacmans tag you, you become a pacman as well and try to tag the rest of the players which aren't pacmans. Then we had to choose a partner and of course I chose Ysabella. We had to do spinning passes, chest passes, and other passes too with a rugby ball. I love Pass it because it's really fun to do. Here is a picture of Room 2 doing Pass It.

Heelan Tompkins' Visit

On Wednesday Heelan Tompkins, the New Zealand equestrian paid St Mary’s a visit. She told us all about eventing and horse riding and how she even met her favourite athlete, Usain Bolt. She told us about her life as well and how she took Goofy, her mum’s horse, on an airplane. She even told us about how she loved big events and how she’d always want to go to the Olympics. She got into horse riding because most of the time horses were around her. She even showed us a cool video about the olympics. There was diving, taekwondo, tennis, pole vault, rhythmic and the fireworks and the country dancing. I enjoyed having Heelan at our school. She was really nice and funny.