Tuesday 20 May 2008

Experiments with Chemical Changes at Waimea College

Mapua has a bang at Waimea!

On Thursday 15th Room 5 were on the road to Waimea College to have a very special science lesson......

Room 5 met the science teacher. His name was Paul Croskey and he taught the older students of Waimea College. The first 10 minutes was wasted on a safety instuction and Room 5 started to get restless. All they wanted to do was to blow up things!

But then the real fun started! They had to listen closely to the instructions and watch out - if any drops fell on their hand it would burn. One of the acids Room 5 used was hydrochloric acid.

Near the end of Room 5’s lesson, they got to do what they wanted to do KABOOM!!! Yes they got to blow up an egg! Libby got the pleasure to not only hold a flaming stick but also to be blasted in the face by eggshell! There were two holes, one at the top of the egg and one at the bottom.Then Paul put acid in the in the bottle and stood back while Libby looked around nervously. We waited and waited and waited. Nothing happened so Paul did the same procedure and this time.....KABOOM!!!! We were shot by eggshell and Libby seemed a little shocked to say the least! After that we were to go back to our cars and drive to school after a cool afternoon doing science at Waimea College.


By Charlotte

Mr Wemyss' Farewell





The whole of Mapua school joined together to farewell our wonderful one and only principal Mr Wemyss. It was a wonderful day,the sun was shining and who could of ask for a better day to farewell our principal?

We had two presenters, Shaen and Jessica from Room Five and the person who controlled the sound system, Nic, was from Room Five as well.

The assembly involved two people from each class contributing something to Mr Wemyss. Things that we contributed were: Cards, Models of his office and we can't forget the special green, covered with lots of colorful paper, hat that was given to him from Rooms 1 and 8, and to funk up the assembly he even wore the hat for the whole time - how cool is that?

But it was not only us who contributed to Mr Wemyss it was the teachers as well. They contributed glasses and a bunch of flowers. Of course losing a brilliant principal wasn't that great so the whole school got ready to sing a couple of songs to him as a present to show him how much we loved having him as our principal.

The one year and one term that we had him as our principal may not sound like a lot of time but it was enough for the whole school and teachers to bond with him and laugh with him. It was a great opportunity having having Mr Wemyss and hopefully he will come and visit us sometime....

By Jade

What was hot on the Room 1 and Room 8 camp?

Amazing Damper toasting

We lit the roaring fire next to the rippling sea. I twisted the sticky dough onto my sharp stick and lay it on the embers.
When the toasting was done I poured on golden syrup and munched on my bread. We got some more pointy sticks and stuck on some melting marshmallows and roasted them on the embers.
When the marshmallows were ready I took them off the flame and put them in my mouth. Yummy!

Next day we put on our togs and jumped in the kayaks. Splash! All the boats bobbed around in the water. We had lots of races and I won nearly all of them but I fell in getting out!

Molly



Melting Marshmallows


At camp we made some damper. It was delicious. We also roasted marshmallows. Yummy. The adults made the damper. We got some sticks and put some damper on them. We also had golden syrup. It was delicious. We did all of this fun on the Leisure Park beach.

Harri

Gone Fishing

We baited our hooks and cast our rods out to the glistening cold ocean. We were getting lots and lots of bites but no fish. They just kept eating all our squishy bait. Just then Mac caught a sea creature with a slimy tail and one slippery fin on each side. He put it back and we started fishing again.

I went to get some bait from a parent helper and plopped my rod back in the glistening ocean.

Then it was time to go so we packed up and got on our bikes and rode off.
Bethan

Skateboarding



Barbra and Laura went to see what the guys had to say about the new skating area?
They said that they are pleased that the teachers decided to give them a bigger skate area and now every day the skate area is jam packed with skateboarders, scooterers and anything with wheels on it.

A couple of the roller bladders, Nina and Wills said that they're very thankful for the skating area, but it’s not really big enough because there’s more skaters and scooters on the skating area than the kids roller blading. But at least they're having a good time and have somewhere to roller blade.

As for the skateboarders, they're still trying to learn new x-treme tricks on their skateboards. One of them is Josh. He thinks that it’s pretty awesome to skate on the new skating area and it has a really solid kind of gravel ground to master new skateboarding tricks. He thinks that having a skating area’s pretty cool and that once the senior syndicate have a playing area for us to do anything we want on it.


The scooterers are having an amazing time too and think that the new skating area is really cool and that it’s really mint. Everybody wants to thank the staff members of the school, for having the pleasure of giving us the new skating area.

Room 6's camp

Room 6 camp was awesome, exhilarating and exciting. There were tons of challenging activities to do at Camp Hanmer and one of the best activities was tree climbing! It was hard and exhausting but it was fun at the same time!


Another great part of camp would probably be getting to know your friends a little more as well as the teacher and the parents!

The activities that we did at camp Hanmer were a lot of fun and challenging too. Some activities that we did were driving the village cruisers. We had to go in groups and drive around Hanmer Springs. We were given a sheet with questions to answer at certain places. We would drive to that place using a map and write down the answer. of this challenge is "Go to the house with the white rocks in front of it. What is the name of the house?" So we would go and try to find that house and write down what that house was called.

Other activities were: Mini golf,going around and around the maze trying to get to the exit and as with the village cruisers, we had a sheet and tried to find the symbols that were on the sheet and write down the word that was under the symbol. Of course they had to make it difficult and there were some obstacles where you would get wet or frightened and that was awesome!

The other activities that we took part in were walking up a huge hill called Conical Hill but most of us thought it was boring! But other then that it was pretty cool walking with your friends and maybe the teacher and the parents as well.

Another great part of camp was the awesome food. On Monday we had morning tea at the Kawatiri Junction with the food that we made at home, then we had lunch at Lake Daniel's car park with the left over food from morning tea, and at dinner time we had Lasagne with lettuce salad. After dinner we got to put our greedy little hands on an ice cream sundae then for supper we gobbled down a cup of milo or just a drink of water with scrumptious home baking. On Tuesday it was breakfast time, yes the most important meal of the day, we had toast with an option of spreads or cereal with an option of tined fruit to go on top. There was plenty of more wonderful delicious , delectable goodies that we ate on camp but I just don't want to give you a sore tummy.

Camp was really awesome.

Try-athalon





On your marks! Get set! Go!
These were the first words that launched the first race of the Mapua School try-athalon. The sun was gleaming down, people cheering, yelling, supporting and the competition was fierce.

Every student took part in the try-athalon, everyone gave it their best. There were stories of success and many examples of people competing hard and playing fair.


Examples of fair play were:
Alex who went back and touched the wall to make sure he swam the whole length so that he wasn’t being unfair to all the other competitors in his age group. It’s not a win if you get there by unfair actions.

Molly knew that Ellie was not confident about her abilities to complete the running section so she decided to encourage her all the way by saying things like “You are doing well” and “You can do this, Ellie” and “Nearly there Ellie”.

Ellie had been given permission to only run half the number of laps for her age group if she wanted to. But with Molly’s encouragement and her determination to persist, she managed to complete all the laps.

Way to go Alex, Molly and Ellie.

The other fantastic thing you can see in the photos was how the Year 8 students helped the Year 1 children as they competed for the first time.

The grand finale was the race between students and adults . The exhilarating speed of this race was overwhelming. All students wanted to beat the adults and the adults didn’t want to get beaten by kids. And the outcome - the parents’ teams won and the students came in 3rd while the teachers came 4th.

Tuesday 13 May 2008

2008 Happenings start here!

Yay! Finally we are underway with our 2008 Events group. Last Term we were soooo busy with our vision launch, getting to know our new classes, camps and sporting events that we found it hard to get together as a group and make a start reporting on the great stuff that was happening.
This Events blog is powered by a small group of talented (even if we do say so ourselves) writers at Mapua School. Please keep coming back to check on the updates to this blog.




One of the first events for this year was the launch of our new school vision, To Be All I Can.
We all wrote down our dreams and goals for our futures, tied them to the string of a helium filled balloon and released them after Mr Wemyss talked to us about the meaning of the vision.
Our vision goals are: To be responsible community members, To have high academic success, to be competent in communication, to be active, to be creative and to be effective thinkers.
To help us achieve our goals we are learning about the habits of mind that we need to have to be successful. Last Term we tried oto improve our abilities to persevere and to step outside our comfort zones with whatever we were doing. This Term we are working on our listening and questioning skills.