Fiordland Holiday By Gloria Harvey

Yesterday Room 1's maths group the Spheres got an awesome new game called Fiordland Holiday.

It's a really fun maths game and it's really good way to learn your advanced times tables like on one of the cards it's got on a Milford Sound day tour, see the famous Mirror Lakes Score 3 x 300 points. Then you would work out the equation and in these circumstances  you would have 9oo points! Sometimes you only get to solve a problem but thats still fun.   You travel round the board and if you land on an animal you get the amount of points that's written down on the board. Whoever gets the most points wins the game.I'm really happy we got the new game and I bet people will stay happy using it! 

Ballroom dancing

I learnt that there are many types of dances that link to Ballroom dancing like Tango, Jive, Salsa, and ChaCha. Ballroom dancing is all about flashy costumes and make up. You have to be fit and learn complicated dance skills, such as turns and dips. There are two different types of tango, the American Tango and the International Tango. Tango came from Argentina and made its way to Europe and gained popularity in Paris. As the European dancers enjoyed the music and the passion of the dance, they began to inject their own culture, style and technique. In an effort to teach a standardized version of Tango, the English eventually codified their own version of Tango for instruction in dance schools and for preformance in competitions in 1922.

Morris dancing

Last Wednesday a group of Morris Dancers came to our school to show us some dances.  I learnt that because the Morris Dancers used to dance in barns, they wore bells around their ankles to scare away the mice, but the bells also help keep the beat. They also used big hankies for some dances and they used them to scare away any witches that might have been about.  Morris Dancing is usually about things that happen in their everyday lives, like a rain or sunshine dance.   My favorite dance was the Lollypop Dance.   

Dance Term 2 2008

This term we are having a school Dance Festival and we are looking at different styles of dance. So far we have learnt that ...
- people dance for fun
- we dance on special occasions
- people enter dance competitions
- dance is for everyone young and old
- cultural dancing shows where people are from
- there are loads of different styles you can learn
- value your body and how it moves
I can't dance but I am looking forward to learning about it.

Sand Sculptures

On Wedsnesday the 2nd of April, Waikawa Bay School went to Whites Bay. We did lots of activities but my favourite was making the sand sculptures. There were turtles, whales, sand castles and a whole lot more. I made a seahorse and I am very proud of it. My friends made great sculptures too.

Shrimps

Last Wednesday the whole school went to Whites Bay we did lots of activities and we walked to the rock pools. We saw some small shrimps and I learnt that shrimps are very small and very hard to see.

Huhu Grubs

When Waikawa Bay school went to Whites bay for a school trip room 1 found some Huhu grubs living in the sand above the high tide mark near some rocks. We had to dig about 15 centimetres below the surface of the sand. They were big , fat and had a gooey feeling. When we put them back on the sand they burrowed back into the sand.