Merit Blog Post #5 Home Learning Challenge

Home Learning Challenge: Design Your Own Challenge (A12)

For the last Home Learning Challenge for Merit, I have created a presentation of Friendship and why it is important to have. The first thing I did was to decide what to do this on. E.g. Docs, Slides.
I chose to do this on slides because it would look much neater and organised. I enjoyed this challenge because I also got to learn more about friendship and I like researching to get ideas for my presentations. I found some good quotes to go with this topic and I thought they were pretty nice.

I chose to do a Design My Own Challenge because I liked the thought of having a friendship presentation because I want people to know how important it is to have friends and to have fun as well. I think this challenge is a good one for me because I learnt more about friendship and know what it takes to be a good friend.

The CARE Values that I showed were Excellence and Respect.
I showed Excellence by using my time wisely and not spending a lot of time just to find the pictures or backgrounds.
I showed Respect by referencing because if I don't reference then it will be call plagiarism because I have stolen their ideas and have not referenced.

Merit Blog Post #4 Home Learning Challenge

Home Learning Challenge: Create a movie/digital presentation of how the Oaklands CARE values are used by students at our school. (R3)

This is a home learning challenge that I have worked on this week. This slide show took me about 1 and 1/2 hours. What I did first was to gather ideas on how how this slide is going to be formatted. I also used a Brainstorm to get ideas to for each of the slides. I chose this challenge because I thought making a presentation of the CARE Values would be a good choice for me. I also tried to keep it simple and as descriptive as I can. I put a lot of effort into making this because I had to go through Google to find appropriate pictures to display in this.

I enjoyed making this presentation because I like having the different backgrounds on each slide and I tried to make it as creative as possible, so I think I did pretty good. I think I can improve on putting more detail into this and researching more about these values and finding some other meanings to it.

The CARE Values that I showed were Active Thinking and Excellence.
I showed Active Thinking by getting ideas from my brain and making it a good presentation to read.
I showed Excellence by using my time wisely and getting this done to a proud standard.

Blog Post #3 Home Learning Challenge

Home Learning Challenge: Start a new hobby, research it and make something to give to someone as a gift (E.g pottery, origami, cards, knitting). (C7)

On Friday, I completed another Home Learning Challenge which was to start a new hobby and give it as a gift. For this challenge, I have made a few Valentines Cards for Valentines this year. It was pretty hard getting ideas of what to do but in the end I got there. I decided to combine Origami and cards together to make some neat Origami Cards.

I had found some lovely pink paper to do this with and some red paper as well. I looked on the web for some more ideas to see what Valentines I should do. I found a website that teaches simple origami that wont take that long. I thought maybe I could make origami hearts to put on the cards so I followed the instructions to make them. They were actually quite easy as it had said it was going to be easy.

It was fun making them and have decided I will be giving them to family for some love. This Challenge took me about 30-45 mins including looking for ideas and websites. What I found Challenging was getting my ink pen to work because it would look so much nicer with it instead of a normal pen.

The CARE Values that I showed were Community and Excellence.
I showed Community by cleaning up everything I had left and keeping my space neat and tidy.
I showed Excellence by giving it my best effort into the colors and all of that.

Merit Blog Post #5 Key Leadership (Assembly Presentation)

THE PRESENTATION IS ABOVE :)

On Monday, after lunch, we had a Whole School Assembly hosted by the Yr 4 Hub. It was also the House Captains that needed to launch an event to the whole school. We started the presentation on a google slide and talked through about the information for the event. It was about the rubbish at our school and how we can prevent it to grow a larger amount. We painted Bins of our house colors and used them to collect rubbish from everyone.

I ideal of this idea was to stop the rubbish progressing at our school and to clean it up for a healthy environment. The first House to fill up their house bin with rubbish, wins 100 house points for their house. We thought this would be a fantastic idea to stop rubbish at our school and make it into a more fun competition for everyone to participate in.

The CARE Values that I showed were Excellence and Active Thinking.
I showed Excellence by committing to the idea and sharing it to the whole school.
I showed Active Thinking by being active when it is my turn to talk.

Merit Blog Post #5 Leadership Around The School ( Getting Involved Football and French Cricket )

On Friday, at Morning Tea, I played a game of football with my friends. It was only a 4 person game because only four people played. We set up teams of 2 and played 2v2. It was me and Wariesha against Jacinta and Alex. The first score was us, but then Jacinta and Alex trashed us with 1-5. After we had a few rounds of football, we decided to have a team talk about new strategies to try win the other team. Wariesha and I thought of trying to trick them with our foot skills and more passing between us. Alex and Jacinta won that match with an overall score of 2-7.

Next we had a go at French Cricket, and made sure everyone knows how to play.
We have decided that Jacinta would go first knowing that she likes to be first. I had the ball, and I started it off with a very unusual throw. Apparently Wariesha told me I was very bad at catching, but I had to admit, I was kinda bad. :/

When it was my turn to bat the ball, I was pretty excited because I love batting. Although It did take a while to get me out. We also earned Pozis for playing nicely and positively as well. It was really fun playing with my friends because they were supportive and enthusiastic.

The CARE Values that I showed were Excellence and Community.
I showed Excellence by playing fairly and getting involved positively.
I showed Community by Putting the gear that we used away and picking up any other gear we saw lying around.

Merit Blog Post #2 Home Learning Challenge

Home Learning Challenge: Design your own Challenge (E10)

For my second Home Learning Challenge this year, I decided to create my own challenge and add a little bit of art into place. For this Design My Own Challenge, I have painted a realistic piece of Landscape for this particular challenge. 

Before painting I had to start it off with drawing and tracing outlines for where everything is going to go. E.g. Buildings, Mountains. I used paintbrushes to do all of that because i feel more confident at it than pencil. A lot of the tools that I used were very different to normal art paintbrushes. Some of them are made specifically for the type of paint im using (which is oil ). Even though oil art is pretty cool, the smell of it isn't really pleasant... But I get used to it. 

HERE ARE JUST SOME OF THE TOOLS I USE FOR OIL ART!

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I decided to go with a nice view themed art and add little twists to it as well. This artwork took weeks to finish but I am very proud of it because I have put in a lot of effort to make it look better. This is also one of my favorite artwork I have done because it's really nice to look at and it is also done well.

The CARE Values that I showed were Excellence and Active Thinking.

I showed Excellence by putting in a lot of effort into this and showing pride to this artwork.

I showed Active Thinking by thinking outside the box and getting new ideas of what I will add to this.     FINISH PRODUCT!!!!!----------------}

Merit Blog Post #4 Leadership Around The School (Tech)

On Thursday, all of the year 7/8 hub went to technology at Lincoln. I was in group C with food tech and we started of with the Mandarin Lesson. We learnt all about different countries and what they're called. We learnt how to say England, France, China, Australia and many more. We also learnt phrases that was related to those countries that we talked about and we had to write them down in our mandarin book. Mandarin was a good kickoff start to our tech. After that, we got started into cooking, but before that we had to wash our hands and put our aprons on.

Every group had a different recipe to cook and we all had to make a video on how to make that specific recipe. My group which was with Hailey and Izzy got the egg cheese and ham recipe. Before we started cooking and making our video, we had to finish the plan that we all have. We really wanted the smoothie recipe but we knew we couldn't get what we wanted. It was really hard to cook and make the video as we go along, but we got it all finished on time. The teacher was really happy about our video that she wanted to show the group it. My favorite part of this tech session was being able to complete our video with our finished product, and we got to eat it as well.

The CARE Values that I showed were Excellence and Respect.
I showed Excellence by getting our task done and setting a high standard for everyone else.
I showed Respect by letting everyone have a go at editing and videoing for our video.

Merit Blog Post #4 Key Leadership

On Thursday, all the House Captains got together and formed a little meeting about our idea for the whole school. We talked about painting the bins and getting everything ready for our major event.
On Thursday we put our idea into action and at Lunch, we started of painting the bins of our house color. Mine was Miro House (Blue). We all brought in some old clothes to wear while painting so we don't get ourselves covered with paint on our school uniform. Our idea was coming along pretty good because we are very organised and we know what we are going to do.

The CARE Values that I showed were Active Thinking and Community.
I showed Active Thinking by contributing to the group and giving ideas on how we should do it.
I showed Community by helping others when they needed help with the job.

Merit Blog Post #3 Leadership Around The School (Getting Involved Multi Cultural Day)

Today on Tuesday 21st Feb, Oaklands School had a fun Multi Cultural Day. What it is was we had to come to school dressed in something that represents our culture. What I wore to school was Black and White to show NZ spirit and a BLACK CAPS Flag to also show my culture. I went with NZ because i thought I belonged in New Zealand more. We kicked off the morning with some cool activities with the NTEC Students.

Firstly we had to present our mihi to them. They had no idea what we were talking about because it was all in Maori. I also repeated my mihi in the english version so they know what we were saying. They showed us some incredible performances from all their different cultures like India and The Philippines. I enjoyed all of them because I liked seeing different things from different countries.

They also taught us some very cool games that were about agility and teamwork. After Lunch, we had a Multi Cultural Assembly that had a whole heap of performances from lots of different countries. My favorite performance was probably the Samoan Dance.

The CARE Values that I showed during this time was Excellence and Respect.
I showed Excellence by participating in their games positively and having fun.
I showed Respect by respecting everyone's culture and not making fun of it just because it is different.

Merit Blog Post #3 Key Leadership

On Wednesday 15th, we had a leadership meeting about planning our first event at Oaklands 2017. Firstly the house captains all went out to learn how to place the Oaklands Banners up and know how to tie them up so they wont fall. After that, the house captains all meet up to discuss an important event about rubbish at our school, and how we could fix the littering in our environment. We had a lot of talking about our plan and deciding how we are going to start this. 

We all shared a doc with each other to record our ideas and pictures if we need. We were also thinking of fundraising for money for the bins we were going to get for each house. We will spray paint the bins to get the colors for our houses which is Blue, Red, Yellow and Green. I think this idea is going to work, with all of our ideas as this is for the house captains to organize for the school.

The CARE Values that I showed were Respect and Active Thinking.

I showed Respect by listening to everyone's ideas and respecting their opinions.

I showed Active Thinking by contributing to the group positively and giving ideas to support our main idea.

Merit Blog Post #2 Key Leadership

On Thursday in the afternoon, we had our leadership meeting and discussed about public speaking. We have decided to talk about it since it is our main focus anyway. So then, what we had to do was, we had been given a poem to memorize. After reading it a few times we had to pair up with a partner and trying to say that out clear to them. Kinda like public speaking. So then once we have done that, the teacher put our pairs together to form a group of 4 and we started to practice in that little group. We were also given the task to talk about which parts we each are going to say and we had to practice public speaking in front of the whole leadership group. After that, we were put in the spot to make up a speech up about a topic that we had drawn and we had about a minute to make up a speech in front of everyone. I found that challenging because my topic I had picked out was quite hard.

The CARE Values I showed were Excellence and Community.
I showed Excellence because I just go on with what we had to do even if it was kinda out of my comfit zone.
I showed Community by not fiddling or talking to anyone while the others were presenting their speech on the spot.

Merit Blog Post #2 Leadership Around The School (Tech)

On Thursday we started our first technology session at Lincoln Primary. I was in Group C and we began with Food Tech. But before we got to cook, we had to go to the mandarin lesson for 30 mins. After the Mandarin lesson we went back to the food tech station an started to get ready. Firstly we learnt all the basics of safety like knives and ovens. Then we went over on a hygiene lesson and was told to wash our hands before we started cooking. We then learnt a recipe which I forgot what was called. It was something similar to a hot dog. We grilled it in the oven for a few minutes and it tasted good. At the end when we came back from interval, clean up our messes and rinsed and cleaned our dishes. I quite enjoyed the first day of tech 2017.

The CARE Values I showed at tech were Respect and Excellence.
I showed Respect by listening carefully to the teacher so I know the safety in the kitchen.
I showed Excellence by trying my best even though I am not that in to cooking.

Merit Blog Post #1 Home Learning Challenge

Home Learning Challenge: Research a different culture. Find out how their culture differs to yours. Present your findings. (R6)

For my first home learning challenge this year, I decided to research a different country and discover how it differs to NZ. At first it was a struggle because I couldn't decide what country to research on. So after that I decided to research Italy, as it sounded interesting to learn about. I did a heap of research but couldn't really find anything that I understand. I looked on a kids website and found a whole lot of information for my challenge. I had to think of how to display it as well. So here is what I came up with.

The CARE values that I showed were Excellence and Active Thinking.

I showed Excellence by putting in my best effort for this challenge.

I showed Active Thinking by using an open mind and thinking of good ideas to use in this research.

Merit Blog Post #1 Leadership Around The School (Four Square)

Today at Lunch, me and my friends played Four Square out on the court area by the classrooms. Firstly we sorted out who would be in which spot and we used paper scissors rock. We then started of the game and Amelia was the King. We had a few frustrations such as, when kids run through our game, as it is called interference. That for us was really annoying, but we kindly told them to go around the game. We didn't want anyone to get hurt with the ball so we directed them around. As we got onto the game, I finally made it to be the King. The King gets to serve first. Overall this was a fun game to play at lunch especially with your friends.

The CARE values that I showed playing this game are Respect and Excellence
I showed the Respect value by not arguing with the ref if I hadn't agreed to what they're saying. I just let it go and be a good sport if I got out.
I showed the Excellence value by not giving up even if I was pretty bad at it and I kept trying and I made it to the King spot.

Merit Blog Post #1 Key Leadership

On Thursday afternoon, I had a student leader meeting. Firstly we had a look at what makes a good leader and we read an article about it. We read up to Chapter 3 and had to think of how we are going to be a positive leader. The article we read was about how a leader has to be fun and responsible. I quite enjoyed reading the article because I got to learn a few more things about being a great leader at our school. I learnt that leaders are known as role models and they proceed on their goals.

The CARE values I showed were Respect and Community.
I showed Respect by listening to the teacher and focusing on what they're saying.
I showed Community by helping pack up the space when the meeting was finished.