Our class artist

Danny Rae

Our class artist Danny Rae is a self-taught artist who grew up in Whangarei Heads, New Zealand. She is currently living in London, UK. 

We found her on the Whangarei Heads arts trail.

Rae creates her art pieces using polymer clay, which is an unusual medium. She creates entirely unique and detailed pieces that are textured and have a subtle 3D effect.

Here are the steps Danny Rae takes to create her design pieces: 

Rae finds inspiration in native flora and fauna, with most of her pieces featuring New Zealand birds. Now that she is living in the UK she expects to create work inspired locally as well as from her travels in Central and South America. Her pieces are held in private collections around New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

You can find more of her work on her Whangarei Heads page. 

We chose Danny Rae as our class artist as she uses bright colours, New Zealand birds as her inspiration and clay which is an unusual medium. We look forward to being inspired by her work and creating great pieces of art. 

Watch this space to see our creations! 

Duffy Books

On Tuesday (Term 3 week 6) we got an exciting delivery from Scholastic New Zealand. 
We are now a Duffy School, this means we are able to celebrate our reading enjoyment and progress in a range of ways. 

Check out our box unwrapping! 
We're so excited to take these books home and share them with our friends and whanau. 

Thank you Duffy Books in Homes!

Recycling station

This term our concept focus has been sustainability. We have chosen to focus on environmental sustainability, in particular to ensure that:

'We're tidy kiwis and we promise to put litter in its place!'

We learnt about where our rubbish (which we throw in the general rubbish bin) ends up.

Once the rubbish truck picks up our rubbish they take it to the landfill. Here rubbish can take 1000's of years to decompose (break down). 

Illustration by Jason

So we decided we needed to do something to make sure we send as little rubbish to the landfill as possible. We created a rubbish station in our class to sort our rubbish into the correct bins. 

Our 5 bins are: 

• Organic (goes to our school worm farm) 
• Plastic (Some goes to Countdown for soft plastic recycling) 
• Aluminum 
• Paper & cardboard (goes to the recycling center) 
• General rubbish (goes to the landfill) 

As you can see the General rubbish bin now has less rubbish, and our rubbish is being redirected to be reused and recycled.

We hope more people realise how important our environment is, and try to do their bit to reduce, reuse and recycle. 

Winter writing and art

Brrr it's cold!!!
It sure is cold out there. So we decided to write about our favorite thing to do in winter.
Some of us used our 5 senses (feel, taste, hear, look and smell) to describe winter.

We used crayon and dye to create our art pieces.

We hope you enjoy reading our winter writing pieces.

Smart E-profiles

Cottier class have been learning how to make a smart digital footprint. 
This means what is safe & not safe to share online. 

Check out some of our smart footprint profile's we created.

They show information about ourselves which is okay to post online. As well as information about our school and learning which is okay to share with other people. 

Thank you to Gerhard, who has been making sure we are safe online. 

What do you think our profile's are safe to share online? 

Matariki Art

Happy Matariki! 

As part of our Matariki celebration we designed and created holographic stars to show the arrival of Matariki. 

Holographic: when something looks 3D. 

We hope you enjoy our creations. They have lit up our classroom. 

How many stars are in the Matariki cluster? 

MOTAT

On Friday 22nd February, room 1,2 and 7 went to MOTAT to learn about flight. We had a super fun packed day. First we saw lots of old aeroplanes and learnt about the 4 forces of flight (lift, weight, thrust and drag). Then we caught the tram to MOTAT 1 and got to go see the Above and Beyond exhibition. This exhibition was very interactive, we got to Soar up high like a bird in the 'Spread Your Wings' flying experience, and design a Jet plane which we could fly on a 3D interactive simulator.