Weaving our own kete

The shared book that Mrs Field read in our first week back was called The Woven Flax Kete by Angie Belcher. It told the story of Rawiri who went on camp in the Whirinaki Forest. He took the old woven flax kete, given to him by his Nana.

She told him he could put treasures in it but Rawiri was not sure they could fit in there.

As he went on his tramp and sleepover, he found qualities like leadership, guidance, care, trust, patience, encouragement and co-operation slipped in to the kete. The other children in the class saw Rawiri show such qualities.

We practised weaving paper and made our own kete with a piece of paua, a feather and a string handle. We showed some of the qualities that Rawiri had by helping others as well as resilience and perseverance. Here are some of the stages we went through to make our kete.

Problem solving with spaghetti and marshmallows to make the tallest tower.

On the last day of term we were put into groups of three or four people. We had 18 marshmallows and a handful of spaghetti dried pasta.

In 20 minutes, we had to work together to make the tallest tower we could. It was harder than we thought! We tried a whole lot of ways and when the time ran out, we measured them. Some of them collapsed, sadly.

TIME for stopwatch work!

Room 5 are learning about time in Maths. We have looked at how many seconds in a minute, days in a week, month or year and how to read analogue and digital time.

We still have lots of questions so we decided to start with how long is a minute ? How many things can we do in one minute? Here are some of our examples using the stopwatches.

Weaving - skills to make a thing of beauty

Christine took time to help look for Millie A's paper weaving that somehow disappeared. When she looked out the door and really searched hard, she came across this "truly beautiful weaving" and photographed it.

Making jelly using division.

We had 25 people in our class including Mrs Field and Mrs White. We had five different jelly flavours. We calculated how many people could be in each group. 25 divided into 5 groups equals 5 so we had 5 groups of 5.

Next we chose the jelly flavour we wanted -lemon, lime, raspberry, boysenberry or orange. We made the jelly with 500 mls of hot water and stirred the jelly crystals into it. They dissolved quickly. We worked out that each person would get 100 mls of jelly because 500 divided by 5 = 100.

We measured up to the 500mls line on the measuring jug and shared the jelly liquid into plastic cups with our names on them. 

The jug had a maximum capacity of 2 litres. We only filled it up one quarter of the way. That was up to 500 millilitres.

After they had been in the hall kitchen fridge over lunchtime, we ate them. They were yum! 

We found out that we had made 2 .5 litres of jelly in total. We used our maths knowledge to put 5 lots of 500mls together. Some added 500 + 500, others did 5 x 500. I wonder how you would work it out?