We already know we're winners, but let's see...

Hi everyone,

We already know that what we do on this blog is something to be proud of - the feeling that we get from sharing our learning with others who are interested is great!

... but just for fun (because you never know!) I've gone ahead and entered us into the Interface Awards for 2011.  They will put five educational blogs in New Zealand into the finals and from there people vote for their favourites.  Let's keep our fingers crossed that we make the finals - that in itself would be such a huge achievement!  

Please wish us luck!

LH3, What's the best part about having the blog in your opinion?

Cooking to Make a Difference...

Courtney and Hana are busy learning all about cookbooks as some of you are aware, as they'd like to raise money through the sale of their very own.

Here Hana and Courtney talk to you about their new learning in a cooking forum - they've been lucky to receive recipes not only from Stonefields but also cooks from all over the world!


Cook book - making a difference - Hana and Courtney from Sarah Holland on Vimeo.

Would you like to keep an eye on their responses...?



(click here to see the actual website)

S.P.C.A cupcake day, the actual day!!

Hi guys!

Remember the post for the S.P.C.A cupcake day? You do!! Oh that's good!! Yesterday WAS the S.P.C.A cupcake day! We started of selling the cupcakes at school during morning tea time.  We sold lots of cupcakes at morning tea time (we think maybe about 10-15 of them!!)

Then at 2:30 Maddy, Dani, Alex and Craig all went up to Animates on Lunn Ave. We set up and then started selling the left over cupcakes. It was slow at the start but we started to get more people to come to our store with the help of the mobile cupcake people! (Alex, Dani and Maddy.) They influenced some of the people in shops to come to our stall and buy our cupcakes. The mobile cupcake people also got people to buy our cupcakes on the go! The Animates staff also bought some cupcakes from us as well. Soon after they bought the cupcakes, one of the staff members came outside and gave us all a lollipop each! At 4:30 we eventually sold our last cupcake!! (to someone named "Edwin") Today we counted the money and guess how much we raised!??!

$157!!!!!!!!!!!  We are so proud!  We have definitely Made A Difference to the S.P.C.A!!

Bye for now!!

Dani, Maddy, Alex and Craig

PS: Thank you to everyone who came up and got cupcakes, you helped make a difference too! 

This is us selling them at school and up outside the pet shop.

 

We also got to count the money up and tell everyone how much we raised.  We learnt that it's easier to count money like that when you put the coins into piles of $10 and much easier to check like that too.

The Inter-school Cross Country - Yahoo!!

Hi it's Hossain, Craig, Ruby and Samo here.

Today we went to the inter-school Cross Country competition and we had so much fun! It was fun to represent the school for the first sports competition our school has ever been to!!

There were hundreds of kids from schools all around us and we were very proud of ourselves to be able to compete against such good runners. We all placed between 15th and 31st which is amazing. We had to be determined to finish the race, no matter what and all our blood was rushing to our faces at the end of the races! We had to put water on our faces right after to cool ourselves down.

We would like to thank Miss Rennie and Ms Kinley for taking us and supporting us. Miss Rennie put a lot of effort into training us and getting us ready for the cross country.

Tomorrow we will try to make a photo collage and we'll put it on here.

Go Stonefields!!

Flight from Ledron... Prediction and Bias

We've been doing a really fun activity about predicting and bias.  This is our learning...  We have been 'wondering' and imagining what it might be like in the story, by predicting what is to come.  We have been learning about bias which is when someone has a point of view that goes more one way and when we made our poster and video we had to think about how bias might affect our presentations.

Yesterday we found this crumpled poster and memory stick with a video on it in the desert.  

So... we uncrumpled it and rushed to the leaders.  They took them both off of us straight away but we felt suspicious so we peeked through the door and saw them watching the video...

We recognised Amon right away from the wanted posters all around Ledron, but his message seems strange.  We don't really know what he means but now we're a little worried.

We wonder if we shouldn't have given this to the leaders now.  We hope they don't read this!!

Is this definitely Amon from the posters?  If so, what should we be doing?

(click to enlarge)

Must Love Cats!

I watched Must Love Cats last night on Animal Planet and this particular story caught my attention.- how is this lady making a change to these animals?  To her community?

Take a look at their website if you'd like to know more...

We need your help!!!

Hi this is Courtney and Hana from Learning Hub 3.

For our breakthrough we are making our own cook book and sending all our profit to a chosen charity. We were wondering if you could please send in your cultural recipes to Hana and Courtney . Please try to send in your recipes by Friday 26th August (New Zealand time) but if you they're a bit late thats fine, we would still love to hear from you.

Thank you for your help.

Regards

Hana and Courtney

Science Collages - check them out!

Hi everyone,

We're well into term two now but I realised we never shared our awesome collages with you all - have a look!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Working together - Marble Roll

 

What, a talking dog?!?

Hi everyone,

Have fun watching this video that Paton put us onto!  It's there to raise awareness of the SPCA in America, and we think it's very funny!

(and here's one that Ruby found that she just likes...)

Rugby World Cup Packs

Hi guys

As you know the Rugby World Cup is less than a month away and we got three boxes full of Rugby World Cup stuff and we were lucky to be able to adopt Samoa .

In this photo you will see us wearing our badges and hats that we got in one of the packs and with the other stuff we got in the box we are going to decorate the school.

Are you excited for the Rugby World Cup?  Are you lucky enough to go to any games?

By Ruby, Paton, Nathan and Hossain.

Wildlife project cares for orphaned elephants...

Have a look at this video.  We've been talking a lot about making a difference here in Learning Hub 3, but do you think something like helping orphaned elephants makes a difference in the world?  I'm interested to hear your thoughts!

Sailing Development Squad

Hi, it's Craig here and I would like to talk to you about my sailing.

I sail in a single handed one person boat called an optimist.

This is me sailing my boat

I have been sailing for many years now and have come to be in the top three at Glendowie boating club.

On Thursday the 11th of August I was chosen for the development squad. They choose the top 5 or 6, 11/12 year olds to train in Noumea with other children from Australia and the pacific islands. We are going to get concentrated training for ten days which will help me become a better sailor.

I leave on the 26th of November till the 6th of December 2011.

I am looking forward to sailing in the warm waters of Noumea.

WALHT Choose the best strategy to solve cubed numbers...

Hi this is Finn,Craig and Hossain
We are going to teach you what cubed numbers are...

Cubed numbers are when you times the number by itself and then by itself again. You might have already heard about squared numbers, which is one times less. For example 15 squared is 15 x 15.

Cubed numbers are multiplied by itself once more. For example, 15 cubed is 15 x 15 x 15. 15 cubed is not 15 x 3, it's very important you get that!

Today we worked together in little groups and had to decide what strategy was the best to use when we solved cubed numbers. We had to use multiplication strategies and addition/subtraction ones too.


Some of the strategies we used were

• PVP - Place Value Partitioning
• Compensating (Tidy numbers) and
  
• Doubling and halving
  
• Some of us tried using algorithms but we tried to use the other strategies instead.

We learnt that when you do cubed numbers, you have to solve them in two parts. Like 2 cubed = 2 x 2 x 2 and you work out the first bit which is 2 x 2 first which is 4, then times this answer by 2 again which is 8. You might see 2 cubed written with a normal 2 and then a little 3 on-top on the line after the normal number.

It was hard to solve the bigger cubed numbers like 11 cubed and 15 cubed, especially when we stretched ourselves to try other strategies.

We thought this maths lesson was pretty stretching and our brains had to work really hard but that's OK. We're excited to do more of this tomorrow and to keep pushing ourselves.

Do you know some of these strategies?

Change the World in 5 minutes - MAD?

What do you think guys? How can we Make A Difference??  How inspirational!

The video talks about collecting old mobile phones - Ruby found this information about donating phones to Starship to help give them more money to do the wonderful work they do on our sick kids! What do you think? Click here.

Squared numbers to figure out cubed numbers!

Some of the Cool Calculators and Problem Solvers are learning how to use squared numbers and cubed numbers in maths. We have been learning how to visually represent what a squared number looks like, and have been using lots of different strategies to help us solve them. Then we guessed what a cubed number was and we also made them, using little cubes! We found it much easier to understand what a cubed number equals when we made them.


By Ben and Damien H.

S.P.C.A cupcake day!!!!

On the 5th of August it was breakthrough day in Learning Hub 3. This term we're focusing on helping charities. Whare toru IS MAD (Hub 3 In Society, Making A Difference) is the title of our main learning this term.

We decided to help the SPCA by contributing to their cupcake day. We decided that instead of just selling them at school, to think bigger!! So today at morning tea and lunch time we phoned up Animates on Lunn Ave (our closest pet store) and we asked them if we could sell our cupcakes outside their shop.

They said yes!!! It makes us feel special and excited that we are able to sell our cupcakes up there, because we'll be able to sell them in a bigger environment than school. Also, pet lovers will be going into Animates and we thought they'd especially love to help the SPCA! So they will buy our cupcakes.

The cupcake day is Monday 29 August so keep keep reading the blog because we'll put our poster on when we know the times we'll be there. We need to do some research to find out the best times to be there.

We can't wait!


By Dani and Alex

Checking in with the Brilliant Readers

The Brilliant Readers in LH3 have been working their way through an exciting novel - Flight to Ledron.  They've suggested this book may interest readers aged 10 upwards, with strong reading ability.  Have a look at their conversation to see what they've been learning and thinking about!



Here's their Google Doc, which is still a work in process.



Click here if you would like to read it in full.

Vincents shona script

A couple of months ago we had a new student join hub 3 and he was from Zimbabwe and his name is Vincent and last term we were put in a group to do an animation and today we were working on our script for it and we decided to translate it into shona so that Vincent would understand our script.

Look at us! We've been featured in a video online...

LH3 are famous (again!)

Last term the furniture company that supply a lot of the furniture to the school came in to film in our hub.  We've waited very patiently to see how it would turn out and here it is!

From the Furnware website.