I'm only 10 and I just met John Key!

Wow, imagine that, you're only 10 years old and you get to meet the Prime Minister of your country, along with 3 other pupils from your school.
That's the Right Honourable JOHN KEY {The Prime Minister of New Zealand}. This was on the last day of term 2, Pt England School.

The meeting took place at Ruapotaka Marae in Tamaki,Auckland City. My classmates and I went with our I.C.T. teacher Mrs Tele'a. They were Tanielu, Cruz, Sela and myself. Some of us were getting a little nervous......


There is a good thing going on and it is called the Tamaki transformation and this was the subject that we were talking to him about. We had three questions for him. When we arrived at the marae, it felt like ages waiting for the Prime Minister to come into the marae. There was a group, singing a Maori waiata and the boys sounded like they were doing a haka. There was a lot of other people who had come with him, I think they must have been the Minister of Education and the Mayor of this area.


When he sat down, Maori people began to say a speech in Maori from the side that we were sitting on. Then the side that John Key and all the other Parliamentary people were sitting had a speech too. This would keep going on and there would be a Maori song after about 2 Maori speeches. I think every body that was Maori did a speech and even the Prime Minister himself did a speech in Maori. As I'm not Maori, I didn't understand a single word they were saying but I asumed that they were welcoming each other.


It was kai {lunch} time when we finally did our interview. The interview was really cool, click above and you can watch for yourself.

The history of dinoasurs in a museum

This week on Wednesday we got to go to the museum. They had activities on dinosaurs which is our topic for this term. We had to go with the year fives because we had a test the day before when the rest of the year six's went. We all went on one bus and I was sitting next to a classmate of mine, Moses. It was a long way from our school to the museum in town. We were divided into Five or six groups. In my group it was me, Tanielu, Sela, Seni-Mino, Toreka and our parent helper Havea. When we got there we saw two schools. One of them was Parnell but I do not know what the other school was.

First we went to the natural history part of the museum. It was very cool because they had statues that looked realistic and they also had three lizards. Two of them were green and the other was camouflaged like the little tree that was put in there. Secondly we went outside to have our morning tea.We only had a little time for playing on the field across the street. when we went inside we had to climb a big staircase to get to our next activity.
For our next activity we went into a big wooden circle thing. A guy called Paul was telling us our new activity. For the first part of the activity we went into our groups and Paul put out some special objects into boxes. We all felt them and me and Tanielu smelt it and me and him regretted it because Paul said it was his favourite and you would not guess what it is! It was dinosaur poo! Thats right, dinosaur Poo!!!!!!
The second part of the activity was about moa. They are extinct large New Zealand birds. They think that Moa might have lived when the dinoasurs lived.
After a long day at museum we went back to school.

Mrs Lagitupu the kung fu master

Its been such a great year so far since our fun and hardworking teacher Mrs Lagitupu has been teaching us. The sad thing is she will be leaving us next week but the happy side of it is she gets two bundles of joy! Thats right, you read it correctly, she is having twins! Isn't that exciting?

Time has gone by very fast. We've done so much amazing stuff with her like making movies, podcasting and also blogging. I have learnt so much from her, she is like a kung fu master that is teaching me all these complex and interesting moves.

I wonder what our new teacher is going to be like? Will he or she be fun, nice, hardworking and helpful like Mrs Lagitupu? Anyway whoever gets to teach these wonderful talented pupils in Room 18 we will welcome him or her to our class and we will make them feel at home........maybe

Well we wish you all the best when you go Mrs Lagitupu. Room 18 will miss you and will hope you bring the babies in.

A Samoan recipe for Extension

In Extension, we are making a cookbook with homemade recipes of food we are already eating at home. It will be a combination of dinner and desert recipes. We have different Pacific Island students in Extension so we have come up with a few Island dishes. Last weekend I learnt how to make alaisa fa'apopo, or in English its called Coconut Rice.

Ingredients
3cups of rice, half a can of coconut cream and a pinch of salt

Equipment:
a rice cooker {or a pot} and a bowl

Step 1: Cook your rice as you would normally cook it.

Step 2: In a bowl, pour half a can of coconut cream and then add a pinch of salt to it and mix.

Step 3: Make wells in your cooked rice and pour the coconut cream mixture in evenly. Mix together.

Step 4: Serve and eat when its hot. {My Dad loves this with Koko Samoa which is Samoan cocoa. It tastes way different to cocoa you buy in the shop}

Getting jiggy with Will Smith......

Imagine singing "I'm Yours"  by Jason Mraz with some students, Peni playing the uke and Will Smith "getting jiggy with it" on his seat via iChat video conference. Yes this is true, it all happened on Wednesday 15th April 2009.

A small group of Pt England students and ex students were lucky enough to talk to the famous and talented and amazing movie star and singer! He is so cool and is a really funny guy. He will be getting an award from the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance. Tolerance in the dictionary means allowing and accepting other peoples rights to their own opinions and actions. That was the topic that we talked to Will about.

He was talking to us about this because when he is going to get the award he will be reading a poem about tolerance. This poem will be special because the students in a programme called  R.O.W will have added their own two sentences to the poem that he started off. I would love to see the finished poem.

Peni was funny to Will Smith. This is what he said "We do not tolerate that flag behind you because it is Australian and we are from New Zealand" and then everyone roared with laughter, even Will Smith cracked up laughing.

R.O.W......

In extension we have been working on a project that is in R.O.W. This stands for Rock Our World. It is a world wide project, which involves heaps of countries in the world. They have themes and the theme for this round is food!!!!! {I love my food with a nice cold icy drink too} In my other post, you can read more about what we did.

They also have a format called garageband. You make a music track on this and then send it to the schools who are participating in Rock Our World. Every school in Rock Our World, gets a schedule to add on their computerized instruments. Point England School was on drums for that week. All of us in extension made a track and Moses got the most votes. His track got sent to the next country. Nice work Moses.


On Flickr we made Mihi's to introduce ourselves to Rock Our World. We used pixelmator or hyperstudio 5 to draw our graphics. After we finished drawing we put it into a programme called comic life. This puts our pictures into frames and joins them together to make a really cool page where we can also add notes to it once it is on Flickr. If you want to know what one looks like, you can copy this address. http://www.flickr.com/photos/extpes/3384043466/

The healthy and unhealthy food pyramid

"That looks yummy" I said. 

In extension we were learning about food and the food pyramid . We got to find out what were our favourite meals and our favourite deserts. We were with partners for this activity. My partner and I liked different meals and deserts. I could not chose my meal so I wrote nothing  down and for my desert I wrote down any ice cream and pudding!

Then we got the picture and printed the food pyramid. I found out that most people like fatty and sugary food.