Nelson Arts Festival

A couple of weeks age there was the Nelson Arts Festival. The mask parade was the opening event. Our class went down to Square to see the sculptures in the park. There were lots of beautiful sculptures but one of them was one you could add new parts to. It was an exhibiton of little houses made by Josie Cachemaille. She invited people to make more houses so it would look like a model of Nelson. Patric decided to make a house at home and put it in the exhibition.
Click here to read Patric's writing about it.

Chrissie Ward Visits Room 5

Chrissie Ward came to visit us today. She knows lots about New Zealand animals and has written a book called "Curious Kiwi Creatures." Somehow Chrissie heard that we are growing swan plants to help provide food for monarch caterpillars. She told us lots of interesting facts about monarch butterflies but there were some questions that even Chrissie couldn't answer. She told us about the
Monarch Butterfly NZ Trust. Click to find out more

The Trust organises research groups to find out the answers to some of the questions we asked. It started up in a place called Butterfly Bay in 2002. There had aways been lots of butterflies there because it was a wintering over place for them but one day the people there noticed that there were only about 20 monarchs left so they decided to start a group to help them survive. Chrissie also gave us some pamphlets to put with our swan plants when we sell them at our school Gala on November 11. She asked how many plants we have grown and we haven't even counted them. I'll bet there are more than 100 though!

Music with Brigitte

Music with Brigitte

Today room 5 had a music session in the art hall. We were put into groups of four and given hand-made instruments. They were all different instruments. There was newspaper with a plastic-bag, straws with containers full of water, house tools, beer bottles full of different amounts of water with metal dingers, butter pots full of pasta with rubber bands over the top, and the last instruments were paper plates cellotaped together full of rice. We had to make as many different sounds as we could by using them in different ways. We worked out what those sounds were like in real life. For example my group made a cricket sound with the straws.
Next we read a poem and played our sounds at the right place. I think music is fun.

The Mask Parade

The opening event of the Nelson Arts Festival is always the Mask Parade. This year our school entered. The theme was a "Sparkling, Sustainable Future." We decided to have a clean river down the centre. The Totara Syndicate, (year 5 and 6) made masks of river creatures and were threaded through the river. Along the edges and behind the river there was a native forest of pohutakawa and kowhai trees made by the Kahikatea syndicate, (year 3 and 4). The Year 0 and 1 children were tuis flying around in the forest. At the front of the parade there were the recyclers who also played the chime bars for our music. Along the outside Room 7 people were wearing box masks and sandwich boards. They gave out flyers about the three Rs, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. We had our first parade at school to practice. We were so good in the big parade and we sang all the way. We won the Best School and the Supreme Awards. It was a once in a lifetime experience.

Bedazzled

Bedazzled

There's an exhibition called Bedazzled at the Nelson Provincial Museum. It's all about mirrors and how they work. We went there today to see it. There were concave, convex and plane mirrors.
We used the Alphabet Thinkers' Key to help us remember some of the things we saw there.