Cookbook Preview

Here's a few sneak previews of how the recipes are shaping up for the Motupipi School Lockdown Cookbook.

Dash's Phenomenal Pancakes

Ingredients 

2 c Flour

2 t Baking Powder

a pinch of salt

2 c milk

2 eggs

butter for frying

Utensils used

Frying Pan

Flipper

Instructions

1. Mix dry ingredients (exept sugar) until you can't tell them apart.
2. Beat the eggs and sugar together in a separate bowl until they look like whipped cream.
3. Pour the egg mixture into the dry ingredients and add milk at the same time.
4. Melt butter in the frying pan.
5. Scoop a ladle full of batter into the frying pan.
6. Leave pancake in frying pan until you see bubbles in the middle popping and staying popped in the pancake.
7. Flip them carefully over.
8. Wait and carefully check to see if they are ready.  Leave them until they are golden brown.  If not ready, wait for another 2 - 3 minutes.
9. Flip them onto a plate. Leave to cool slightly.
10. Eat with your favourite toppings!!!!  

Dash's recommendations for toppings 

Whipped cream mixed with maple syrup (Dash's favourite)

Bacon (special occasions)  

Blueberries 

Strawberries

Yoghurt

Whipped cream

Bananas

Lemon

YUM!!!!!!

Vanilla Sponge

Finn

Ingredients

3 eggs

Pinch of salt

3/4 cup sugar

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

50grams melted butter

And....

Jam

Whipped cream or butter icing

Equipment

Bowl

Electric beater

Sifter

2 sponge tins, smeared with butter to stop cake sticking

Timer

Method

Turn oven on 190 Celsius

Beat the eggs, salt and sugar until they turn thick. 

Sift flour and baking powder and mix in gently until no lumps.
Stir in melted butter.

Pour into the two tins and put in the oven

Put timer on for 12-15 minutes until golden and cake springs back when you touch it.

Cool then put jam and whipped cream or butter icing in the middle and ice the top. Delicious!

Finn's PhD in Grouping Prehistoric Animals

Finn has been grouping prehistoric animals and working out what the names mean by looking up the root meaning of the Greek words.

Amelie's PhD in Natural Disasters

Design a Cookbook Cover

Kia Ora All,

Here's a creative task to take you through Thursday and Friday: designing a cookbook cover.

Design brief

Your cookbook cover must...

• Be A5 sized portrait (fold an A4 piece of paper in half).
• Include a boarder roughly 1 centimetre wide.
• Include the following words: 'Motupipi School Lockdown Cookbook 2020'. Some of the words might be smaller than others depending on how important they are. For example 'Lockdown Cookbook' should be the biggest words because they're the most important. 'Motupipi School' is the next most important so they should be smaller and '2020' could be the smallest words. 
• Include high quality illustrations of the food that will be inside the cookbook. So far I have received recipes for: sushi, lemon honey and ginger lollies, pancakes, chocolate cake, chilli chicken, and sponge cake. 
• Be colourful and neatly presented.

When we print the cookbooks (after lockdown), we can make sure that everyone who has done a cover can have a copy printed with their cover on the front. I'd love to see an image of your cover, but be sure to keep it safe unless you have a scanner at home as we'll scan them in to create a high quality image when we get back to school. 

Before you get started I recommend looking at cookbook covers to get some inspiration. Either see what you've got at home or use Google images with the supervision of a parent. 

Rock On,

Mr M

Here are some font ideas, but you are highly encouraged to make up your own to suit the 'vibe' of your cover.

What's On This Week?

Kia Ora All,

I hope you've all had excellent weekends and you're keeping warm - we've got the fire on today. Here's a heads up about what's coming up this week.

• Zoom session at Monday 1.00pm, Wednesday 11.00am and Friday 11.00am.
• Maths Buddy tasks have only been set for those who finished all tasks last week. I don't want to set lots of tasks that build up for kids who aren't completing them. Let me know if your child runs out of tasks, or is having trouble completing them, and I'll take a look. I check results once a week. 
• Reading for this week is working on Sunshine Books. You can log in and read the stories, write a short summary, answer questions and read the book aloud. I am able to hear the recording of the reading and check the written summary and accuracy of the quiz. I highly recommend giving Sunshine Online a crack. If your child has finished the work from last week I'll set some more books today. 
• Please send the recipe to me this week if possible. 
• If you've finished the recipe and typed it up, either draw a high quality illustration of the food or make the dish and photograph it. Send the picture through with your recipe. 
• On Wednesday I'll send out a design brief for the cover of the cookbook. 
• If you're after more writing tasks, feel free to write another recipe or another six sentence story. Keeping a diary is also really fun. Alternatively, writing comics or any sort of free writing is highly encouraged. Any writing that your child enjoys is an excellent use of time in my opinion.

Rock On,

Mr M

Monday Maths Session

Kia Ora All,

I sent out a zoom link for an 11.00 session today, but I have a feeling the link might have gone to people's spam folder. I'll send out another link for 1.00pm. If you don't receive it, and you'd like to participate, please check your spam.

I will send out more details about what's on this week later on today.

Rock On,
Mr M

Sharing Some Work

Olive talking about her electronics project.

Dayananda's Snakes and Ladders Game

Finn's Cooking Project

Dayananda's Reading Activity

Six Sentence Stories

Four Ninjas

By Dayananda

Once upon a time there were four ninja’s called Kai, Zane, Z and Lloyd.

Their master is called Sensei Woo.

Lloyd lives with his other ninja friends in a mountain and they have four pet dragons.

Lloyd’s special talent is spin jitzu.

Lloyd is battling his father Lord Garmadon because he is bad and Sensei turned Lloyd into the
Green ninja to help in the battle against Lord Garmedon and the serpentine.

Lloyd is sad he has to battle his father but he is determined to defeat him and save the world.

The ninjas were in their room one day playing video games when Sensei was meditating with a

special incense and in his mind he saw Lord Garmedon setting off to the village to kick people
out of their homes and destroy the village. So Sensei called the ninjas and they went to the village
and beat Lord Garmedon up until he left and went back home. Lord Garmedon said
“You won't see the last of me”.

Missing Marine

By Mitchell

Once upon a time there was a U.S. Marine named Dave, he was big,
strong and muscular, he was the best in his platoon. He lives at Parris
Island in South Carolina. He is a talented marine, he works in a k-9
unit with his dog Explosive, who detects explosives. Once Dave got
stuck in a cave in Afghanistan, he was alone with his dog, he was
M.I.A (missing in action). He felt super scared, but the dog was ok!
Then the dog sniffed a trail along the back of the cave and saved them both.

Wild Mage
By Dash

Once upon a time there was a Wild Mage stuck in a meadow covered in trees.  His special talent, of course, is magic.  But... slaters were starting to eat his spell book, and he was also worried that all his wizard friends were dead.  He finds a big lost temple being guarded by evil wizards and knights.  He sees a bunch of grave stones and he notices that the graves are from his friends.  But then he notices a crack in the wall, and in that wall are some spell books.  He reaches his hand through and picks up 2 books and runs off without being seen.

The Singer
By Bodhi

Once upon a time there was a young boy who had a giant burn on his face. The little boy lived with his family in a small village. The young boy was a  very talented singer and he loved to perform. When he performed, no one in the village came to see him sing because the burn on his face made him look so different to others. This made the boy very sad. He knew he had to do something to get the village people to listen to him sing. The little boy made a mask and wore it the next time he sang. All the people in the village listened and loved his singing.

The Night Fox
By Que

Once upon a time there was baby FoX. It was a female
and the oldest of the pups. She ran away in the middle
of the night because the pups teased her about her feet.
Her name was Meadow. Meadow was found by two
lovely people under their deck. Their names were John and Martha. They had a dog he was a male. John and Martha
kept Meadow and brought her up like a dog. After a while Meadow and Night, the boy's dog, had puppies.
Martha and John sold 6 of them and they kept 4 of the
puppies. John and Martha bought a new house.
And now they live in the nice big house as Happy as can be.

ThE EnD

Maths task for this week

Kia Ora All,

Here's a bit of fraction work following up from the Zoom sessions we've been doing. Let me know how you get on. Best of luck!

Rock On,
Mr M

Use your coloured pencils and circles to find 3-5 different solutions for this problem.

• Three eights of a circle is coloured Yellow. I can’t remember what colours the rest of the circle were. What might the circle look like?

Use a pencil and paper to write down several different solutions for this problem.

• How many numbers can you make using the digits 3, 4, 5 and 6?

cut some circles into quarters, thirds or eights to find 3-4 solutions to this problem

• I added some fractions together and got the answer of 3. I can't remember what fractions they were. What might they have been? 

Sunshine Books Online

Kia Ora All,

Mrs Cullen has set up the whole school with the Sunshine Classics Reading Programme.  The instructions to parents are to go to www.sunshineclassics.co.nz. If using a computer, you can just log in straight away by clicking on student login. For students using ipads they may have to download the free app.

The program has books which the students read online and activities to do about the books. 

I will send out logins and passwords via individual emails. 

Please check out the programme and give me any feedback about reading levels. 

Rock On,
Mr M

Writing Task - Room 2 Cookbook

Kia Ora All,

This next writing task is about putting together a recipe to be included in a Room 2 Lockdown Cookbook. I recommend writing out the recipe by hand as handwriting is an important skill to maintain, but if you type them up when you send them to me it will save me some time typing them out myself. This also gives you a bit of typing practice too. If you're only able to send an image of the handwritten recipe, that's okay. Lani (my wife) has kindly offered to put the recipes together for us into a little booklet. Lani used to work for Learning Media (they used to produce the School Journal). She still does illustrations for the School Journal regularly.

Please send in pictures of your recipe. This could be a drawing you've done, or photographs of the food. Each recipe needs an image to accompany it.

Later in the week I'll send out a design brief about designing a cover for the cookbook.

Don't forget that a verb is a doing word.

Rock On,
Mr M

What's On This Week?

Kia Ora All,

Here's the plan for home learning this week. A few things to lock in the diary and a few deadlines on projects if that's helpful. Anything you don't get done is fine of course,  but sometimes feeling like there is a timeframe helps to keep kids on task and productive.

I think the ideal home learning programme in, terms of school tasks, (and ours certainly doesn't meet this standard daily so don't worry) would look something like this:

• reading a book of choice for 20-30 minutes
• practice basic facts
• Maths Buddy task or some follow up tasks from the Zoom sessions
• work on the writing task for 20-30 minutes
• work on the reading task for 20-30 minutes

Other things to schedule in include: Zoom maths sessions, publishing the story from last week, cooking, art, physical exercise, etc.

Please let me know if there's anything that I'm not including in the home learning programme that you'd like included or if you need help with anything. Happy to touch base via phone or Zoom if you need me to assist. 

How is everyone going for reading material? Let me know if you need help accessing books online.

Here's a schedule for the week:

Monday:

• New reading task posted
• Maths Buddy Tasks set (Well done to Quinn, Que and Dayananda for finishing all of this week's tasks and Heidi for almost finishing them all)
• 11.00 Zoom maths session

Tuesday

• Try to get your story from last week finished and published. Send it to me to be included in a blog post. If you'd like to video yourself reading it aloud, that'd be great. Otherwise you might convince someone in your bubble to read it aloud for you to video. A picture of your published work is fine or type is and send as a Google Doc. 
• If you've finished the story, write another. Ideas include: a story with an animal in it, a ghost story, a story that doesn't start with 'once upon a time', a story that features food.

Wednesday

• New writing task sent our via blog
• 1.00 Zoom maths session

Thursday

• Tasks related to maths session sent out via blog
• Six sentence stories published on the blog 

Friday

• 11.00 Zoom maths session

Rock On,
Mr M

Preparation for this afternoon's maths session.

Kia Ora All,

This afternoon we're going to do some more problem solving with fractions. We are going to be solving lots of problems involving thirds. To be fast and confident with this, you will need to be able to recall your 3 times tables quickly. If you're not confident with your 3's it might pay to write them out up to 12 x 3 and have them beside you.

1 x 3 = 3
2 x 3 = 6
3 x 3 = 9 etc...

If you're not confident with your 3's don't worry. You will still be fine at this afternoon's session! Just start working away at them.

Here's how to learn your times tables:

Some work that's come in.

Photography by Finn

Bodhi in action at yesterday's Zoom maths session. We had 14 kids online - great work, parents!

Dayananda sent in his reading activity, but I couldn't upload it as it's the wrong file type (sorry Nadine). It was very good though. 

Writing for Week 1 of Term 2

Kia Ora All,

Here's the writing task for the week: writing a six sentence story. This doesn't have to be limited to kids only; if parents would like to participate it would be highly encouraged.

Watch this video of me modelling how to go about it.

Here is the form of the story:

Here is an example:

Once upon a time there lived a very talented artist. He lived in a cottage in the depths of a remote forest in Russia. He was able to create incredibly beautiful art and he enjoyed nothing better than seeing how happy people felt when they looked at his paintings. Unfortunately, because he lived in the depths of a remote forest, only squirrels and other forest creatures ever looked at his art (and they didn't like it very much because, as everyone knows, squirrels don't have much taste when it comes to the fine arts). He wished that he could share his beautiful paintings with people who would enjoy them. So he moved to the city and sold his art to a famous museum; now hundreds of people enjoy his magnificent paintings every day. 

Next week, if there's enough interest, I'll organise a Zoom link so we can share our stories. 

Rock On,

Mr M

Maths Follow Up

Kia Ora All,

It was great to see so many kids online connecting with each other. I thought they did a great job with the open ended maths problems too. The purpose of these problems is to spend some time playing around with maths, rather than just looking for the one 'right' answer.

Here are some other similar problems to work on before out next session. Give them a go and bring your answers and anything you're stuck on to the next session. I encourage you to get several answers for each question and, if you're very confident, try to record the answers in different ways.

Rock On,
Mr M

• One fifth of the class ate one sausage each for school lunches. How many kids were in the class that day and how many sausages did they eat?
• Three quarters of soccer balls were kicked over the fence the rest were flat. How many balls were there all together and how many were flat?
• Two thirds of of the cans in the cupboard were baked beans. How many cans were there and how many were not baked beans? 

What Have Room 2 Kids Been Up To?

David and Dayananda made a new bed for Ithaka. Dayananda was very good with the sander.

Dayananda's Fractions

Thomas made this incredible lego creation during Easter.

Finn and Rory have been cooking up a storm for the last few days, first some cookies yesterday. They watched Storybots "where do french fries come from?" and replicated that, using our very old chip cutter.

Reading for Week 1 of Term 2

Kia Ora All,

Here is a reading task that all the kids in the class can have a crack at. Getting through all this will take several days. You should read the book several times while completing these tasks. I recommend working for about 20-30 minutes a day on this reading assignment.

Here is a pdf of the book if you'd just like to read it.

Here is the audio file.

Below is a video / audiobook I made. Click on the bottom right hand corner where it says "Youtube". This will take you to Youtube. Then use full screen mode and you should be able to read along with the audio.


Before reading: 

1. Have you ever been fishing? Write down or tell someone about what you did.
2. List 5 things you need when you go fishing on a boat.

During Reading

1. Who are the characters?
2. Why doesn't Kele want to wear a lifejacket?
3. What is a kupenga? (you can find this out by reading the story) 
4. How did Grandad know they were at their secret fishing spot?
5. Draw a digram of how Grandad used to catch fish in Tonga.
6. How did Saia get into trouble?
7. Who saved Saia?
8. What did Vika say when she caught a fish?
9. What happened just after Vika caught a fish?
10. What did Grandad use to pull Kele back in?
11. What did Kele say when he caught a fish?

Vocabulary

1. Look up these words: smug, scoff, kupenga, furious. 
2. For each word, find some words that have the same meaning in a thesaurus or online. Write the words next to them. 
3. Write a sentence that uses each word.
4. Choose your favourite word and draw a picture of it. 

After Reading

• Design a Snakes and Ladders board game based on good choices and bad choices. The good choice makes you go up the ladder and the bad choices make you down the snake. Play the game with the people in your bubble. Here is a template you could use.

Rock On,

Mr M

Maths Term 2 Week 1

Kia Ora All,

For maths this week it would be great to get together and do a session via Zoom. Zoom is super easy to use. I just send you a link to click and it opens from your browser - no need to download anything. I was thinking Wednesday at 11.00 might be a good time. If you want to participate, please let me know and so long as I have enough people I'll go ahead and organise the session.

New Maths Buddy tasks have also been set today. 

Here's the maths topic for the week:

Rock On,

Mr M

Easter Activity

Kia Ora Koutou Katoa,

I hope you're all happy, healthy and making the most of your time at home. Here is an easter card idea to keep the kids entertained. If you're in need of an activity, you could watch the video below and then make an easter card for each family member you're in lockdown with. I would love to see photos of the finished product if you'd like to send them in. 

Rock On,

Mr M

Week 2 of the Holidays

Kia Ora All,

I hope you're all doing well and are making the most of this enforced time at home. I've been continuing my gardening odyssey as well as spending some good quality time with the family. The other night we camped out in the back yard and cooked dinner out there too. I've also been playing a bit of guitar again: learning some new songs and dusting off some old ones.

• Well done to Thomas and Dayananda - they both finished all the Maths Buddy tasks I set last week. 
• Finn has been doing some inquiry learning into prehistoric animals. He studies all this in a brilliant reference book DK Dinosaurs, a Children's Encyclopedia (but covering all prehistoric life), he received at last xmas as well as Youtube.  Here is his depiction of the evolution of marine mammals. 

• Dayananda has been going hard with the work I set about the Island. Below is his postcard, list, map and mythical creature. 

We're gearing up for online learning when term 2 kicks into gear (Wed the 15th). I'll be in touch as I figure out a plan of action.

Rock On,

Mr M