Tane Mahuta Day by Room 4

We are celebrating Tane Mahuta Day. It is when we celebrate the trees and our school environment.

Anna painted a tree on our window. 

We all helped to make some beautiful leaves for the tree. We think we have made a lovely tree together.

 

 

We played "I spy" around our school. We had to find the trees in the photos. We had to look very carefully at the photos and the trees to see if they matched.

 

 

 We got to go onto Putikitiki and had a little play on the playground. We also got to see some ladybirds and fantails that like to live in the trees.

Autumn Time by Room 5

Room 5 is loving Autumn time and even though it is getting cold, it means we can have fun with the leaves!  We have used the leaves in our school to do lots of counting forwards and backwards.  We have also used them to do some sketching.  Our favourite thing to do with the leaves was play in them!!  We were so patient when we sat and talked about leaves changing colours, but then look what happened!

Step 1- Talking about the changes in leaves.

Step 2- Touching the leaves and feeling them crunch between our fingers.

Step 3- Throwing the leaves and watching them fall and tumble down.  It's raining leaves!

What a fun time we had.

Calendar Art by Room 12

Yesterday we experimented with the colour green after Mrs Blair saw this fantastic post by Teach Kids Art. 

We made many green colour's into hearts. 

Room 12 walked along our school nature trail we saw lots of trees. Mrs Blair asked us to take a snap shot in our minds of part of the nature trail. 

We sketched in our project books to make a plan and help us remember our snap shot. After that we went inside and drew our sketch on our final bit of paper in preparation for painting our picture. 

Here are some photos of us on our slippery but beautiful autumnal looking nature trail. 

Just wait until you see our final pieces of calendar art!

We are super excited to be making them.

Autumn Writing by Room 10

We used Gail Loane to help us share the things we love about Autumn. We also used our senses to describe Autumn.

Ms O'Neil took photos of our work displayed in our classroom. Please come and visit if you would like to read more.

We wonder how Autumn makes you feel?

Autumn Trees from Room 1

It is now Autumn and this is a season of change.
We looked at the trees in our school and Kruze took some photos of the trees by the office.
In the Orchard, we used the Kidpix tools to draw our own autumn trees. 

Autumn Trees by Room 4

We drew these beautiful autumn trees using Kidpix.

Our pictures needed to have a background colour, a trunk, branches and leaves.

We love drawing with Kidpix. We like drawing trees too.

We think our trees look beautiful. We hope you like them too. 

Finding out why leaves change colour by Room 14

This term we are learning about changes.  This week we have been looking at the changes in seasons and we wanted to know why the leaves change colour in Autumn so we did an experiment.
For this experiment we needed leaves from an evergreen, and green and autumn coloured leaves from deciduous trees, plus some rubbing alcohol and a coffee filter sheet.

 
We cut up the leaves really small with a plastic knife and put them into jars that we covered with rubbing alcohol and labelled.  Then we covered the jars with plastic film and placed them in a tray full of boiling water.  After half an hour we checked to see if the colour from the leaves was showing in the liquid.

Autumn deciduous leaves

Autumn deciduous leaves

Deciduous green leaves

Deciduous green leaves

Evergreen green leaves

We uncovered the jars and placed strips of the filter paper into the liquid.  We checked the jars after half an hour and then again another half hour later. 

Look at our results -

Deciduous Autumn leaves

Deciduous Autumn leaves

Green deciduous leaves

Green deciduous leaves

Green evergreen leaves

What we discovered:

Plants make their own food. They take water from the ground through their roots. They take a gas called carbon dioxide from the air. They turn water and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. Oxygen is a gas in the air that we need to breathe.

Plants make their food using sunlight and something called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll gives leaves their green colour.

 

Winter days are short and dry. Deciduous plants stop making food in the autumn. The chlorophyll goes away. Then we can see orange and yellow colours. These colours were in the leaves all summer, but the green covered them up.

Some leaves turn red. This colour is made in the autumn, from food trapped in the leaves. Brown colours are also made in the autumn. They come from wastes left in the leaves.