Summer sounds

Today I managed to achieve another blog post, this time about Summer sounds (sounds you can hear in Summer in NZ) 

First, we started off by reading a poem about Summer sounds written by Jenny Bornholdt. Next, we were asked to highlight all of the sound words and words we don't understand. 

Then, the funniest part of this blog post... was to go outside and record summer sounds that we can hear on our Chromebook. Listen back to them and create our own Summer Poem. Anyways, here is my poem...

I also chose to Step it Up and narrate my poem using screencastify. So, here is my screencastify...

Building a Dam!

Today the Summer Learning Journey challenged us (SLJ participators) to create a dam, out of natural resources. I made my mine in a aluminium foil baking tray, because their isn't a lot of running water at the moment. While making our dams, we were asked to take pictures of the steps, progress and final result (if we could). Here is how I made my dam... 

First off all, I started by folding up the edges of the tray to make more of a container. Like this..

In the photo above you can see the tray before I folded the edges.

And in this photo above you can see the tray after I had folded up the edges.

From there, I placed a layer of dirt in a straight line right across the centre of my tray. Then I added sticks and bark to support the centre of the dam wall. Like this,

After that, I used another layer of dirt to cover up the sticks, followed by a layer of ferns. I used the ferns as I thought that they could mesh it together with their shape.

And once again, covered the ferns up with dirt. Here is what my dam looked like, before I added water.

Afterwards, as my final step, I added water to one side of the container, to test if the dam wall in the middle blocked the water from seeking though to the other side. 

After pouring the water into one side, I left my dam sit there for around ten minutes. As I watched I saw that water was starting to flow into the other side of the dam. I think in conclusion it worked quite well, and it kept a lot of water from flowing to the other side. 

Although, next time if I made my dam again, I would make my dam wall a curved shape, and not just a straight wall, this is because the curve usually used in huge dams around the world like this one...

makes the structure stronger, and harder for the water to burst the dam wall. Next time, I would also use thick mud or clay, because when I placed the dirt, the surface of my tray was flat, so there were little gaps between the dirt and the tray. 

Have you ever built a dam at the river, creek, or at home? 

 

Pollution

Today I created an animation to show what happens when a plastic bag goes down a drain in the city. 




If you would like the animation to go faster use the arrow keys on your computer or down the bottom of the embedded slides. 

The Water Project

Many countries such as Africa need clean safe water. Today more than one and eight people around the world will start there day by walking, walking to find something. Without wells and toilets, open pits, stagnate ponds and contaminated rivers are all they have, full of disease from animals and human waste that leads to many health issues. As much as 80% of unsafe water leads to illness, sick children can't learn, girls drop out of school because of puberty. In fact waterborne illnesses kill more people every year then of confection and wars on earth. But, it doesn't need to be this way, it's needless all they need is access and that can be solved. With people's support and yours too, the water project will help community's like African towns to help get access to fresh water. The water they so desperately need is sometimes under them, all they need to do is dig, wells can be constructed and provide water to hundreds, rain water can be captured and stored, for others small sand damps can trap seasonal water long enough to replenish the ground. More than 1 billion people don't have access to clean safe water. That's were it all begins when water comes everything changes.

You can help 'The Water Project' by ... donating $20 a month and fundraising for them. Have you ever been a fundraiser for a charity or donated to a charity??? Would you like to help a charity??? Check out  there website at ://thewaterproject.org/

AMAZING ANAURA!

My class (Rm 4) went on a weeks camp to Anaura Bay, I had heaps & heaps of fun!!! And will have many up coming blog post about camp coming. Here is some places we travelled when we were on camp...
(P.S- Sorry that there are two videos, screencastify wouldn't let me film for that long so I had to do 2 separate videos. Hope you enjoy!)
 (play second video to finish off our trip!)