We have been blogging for just over one year now and have been very lucky to meet a lot of great classes from around the world. Today is a very special day for our friends in Mrs. McKenzie’s Class in New Zealand. Their blog, Open the Door to B4, turned one today!
We first met the students in B4 when they visited our blog last April. We have had a great time getting to know them through ours blogs and Skype. The world sure feels like a smaller place đ
Here’s to a great second year of blogging for both of our classes!
Today we finished looking at our last set of New Zealand postcards from Mrs. Faithful’s students in Room 12.
We found out that they have a lot of different symbols and icons that are important to them. There were a few that we have never even heard of before! We would like to know what a koru, a punamu, and a jandal are.
We couldn’t believe how many celebrations they have! They have a celebration called the Chocolate Festival. We found out that they get to make chocolate sculptures, climb chocolate blocks and race jaffas down the steepest hill in the world. We would like to find out what jaffas are.
They have a lot of celebrations that we don’t, but there are some that we both celebrate like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and Christmas.
Here is a mind map we made showing what we learned from their postcards:
Many of the students in our class are a part of the Tech Club that meets after school each week. Today we had a special Skype session with three of the students from Ms. Bee’s class in New Zealand. They taught us part of the dance they will be performing at their end of year assembly. Here is the post from their blog explaining everything:
Room 7 needs help. We need classes from all around to skype us and learn a dance, then send clips of them doing the dance and we will join them all together. We are grooving to a remix of the Black Eyed Peas hit Todayâs gonna be a good day. Our version though, is going to be all about our global community and how classes from around the world have helped us with our learning during 2010.
This is for our end of year performance and the video clips will feature on stage behind the Scoopers themselves dancing. If you are keen, we would like to teach the moves to a group of your students by skype over the next fortnight. Once your class is ready to perform, you could video it and send it to us!
We had a great time learning the dance and getting to know more about the Scoopers and their school!
Today we Skyped with Mrs. Donnellon’s Grade 1 class in New Jersey. We were really excited to be their first Skype call. They are studying communities and wanted to find out more about our community and compare it to theirs.
Justin and Oceana did a great job of writing down the information that the classes shared and Jordan tried back channeling for the first time. Niall was our photographer. Here is what we found out:
*Their community is much larger than ours is. They have 10 elementary schools and 2 highschools. We only have one elementary school with 47 students and no highschool.
*The have a lot of police officers in their community. We have no police officers in our town.
*They have firemen and so do we.
*They have lots of traffic lights and lines on their roads. We only have stop signs.
*They have a lot of big buildings in their community. They have some apartment buildings that are 20 stories high. We have one 2 story hotel.
*There are 18 students in their class and 16 students in our class.
*They eat their lunch in the room where they have gym. None of their students go home for lunch. We eat our packed lunches in our classroom or go home for lunch.
*We both like to go swimming in lakes and many students in both classes have cats and dogs for pets.
*They are not allowed to hunt in their community
*They have bears in their community and we sometimes do if one swims over to our island.
Several weeks ago we were asked to participate in a postcard project with a school from St. Clair, New Zealand. Three classes sent us postcards that they made about their community and asked us to give them feedback about the messages that the cards conveyed.
The first set we looked at belonged to Ms. Bee and the Super 7 Scoopers. You can see our comments on their blog here . They did a wonderful job depicting what life was like in past and present day St. Clair.
The second set of cards we looked at were from Mr. Hunter and his class Room 13. They used beautiful descriptive language on their postcards and inspired us to write St. Clair poems. We hope you like them!
In the next few days we will respond to the final set of postcards. You can sure learn a lot from a postcard!
Today was our second to last day of school and we got to Skype with Mrs. McKenzie and her class from New Zealand. We have been following their blog since we started blogging this year. It was great to finally really meet them. We found out that we have a lot in common with our friends on the other side of the world!
The students in B4 will start their winter holiday on Friday. They will have two weeks off and the students have all sorts of great plans. We will start our summer vacation on Wednesday and will come back on September 7th to start our new school year.
The students in Mrs. McKenzieâs class start school earlier than we do each day and finish later than we do, but they get an hour for lunch and we only get 45 minutes. We also found out that we both have more girls than boys in our classes.
Our friends taught us to count in MÄori and we taught them to count in french. It was pretty tricky!
One of their students, JiaJia, was celebrating her birthday today. We sang her happy birthday. The students in B4 shared with us the funny way they sometimes sing the birthday song. It was the same one we sing too! The birthday girl brought in a stuffed Kereru (wood pigeon) that even made the sound the bird makes when you squeeze its tummy. We had never heard of the Kereru before. Here is a picture of the Kereru and the type of pigeons we see where we live.
They play netball which is kind of like basketball, except it is played outside. There is no backboard, and you can pass the ball, but canât run and dribble it. Rosealeigha wore her netball uniform to show us. Here is a video Mrs. W found showing teams playing netball.
Several of their students play rugby. Tessa showed us her uniform and the trophy and medal she won. Nikaya and Adam showed us their rugby boots. They look like the soccer and baseball cleats that we wear. We got to see their uniforms and even the mouth guards they wear. We donât play rugby in our town, but other places in Canada do.
Thor brought in his skateboard and told us about a trick he can do. Several students in our class have skateboards too, but we donât have a skate park like they do in Reefton.
The closest beach is a half hour away from Reefton school. Our beach is just down the road. Their beaches are sandy and our beaches are rocky. We both like to look for creatures in the rock pools.
They donât have any dangerous wildlife where they live either, although there is a poisonous spider in NZ, but not where they live.
Mrs. McKenzie showed us some New Zealand money. That have beautiful coloured bills just like we do.
Most students bring lunch to school like we do, but they can order lunch from a local shop as well. On Fridays, they can order a hot lunch like chips (fries) and hot dogs.
We hope that we can talk to Mrs. McKenzie and the students in B4 again after we start our new school year!
Our blogging friends in Mrs. W’s P-3 class in Australia posted a Voicethread of their school like the one we made last month. It is very interesting to see how our schools are the same and how they are different. Here are the Voicethreads from both schools:
Here are some of the interesting things we found out when comparing our schools:
*We both have really nice playgrounds, but the students in P-3 have a cover over part of theirs for shade from the sun.
*They have an area to eat outside and we eat inside.
*They hang their back packs outside and we hang ours up in the classroom.
*They have a beautiful garden garden area
*We both have school bells, but theirs is much older than ours is.
*We call our grassy area a field and they call theirs an oval.
*They play footy on their oval and we play soccer.
We are so glad that Mrs. W and her class made a Voicethread!
Today we got to Skype with the Techie Kids and their teacher Mrs. Moore! The Techie Kids have a blog just like we do. We like to visit their blog and see all the great things they are doing at school. We also like to write comments to each other.
Here are some of the things we found out today:
-They have 328 students in their school and we only have 38
-They have 11,000 people in their town and we only have 800
-They like reading Nancy Drew, Junie B. Jones, Baby Sitter’s Club, and Calvin and Hobbes. We think Calvin and Hobbes is funny!
-It was 28°C there today and 11°C here
-We both like a lot of the same outdoor sports
-They have a lot of restaurants to choose from
-They live near Lake St. Clair and like water sports. Lake St. Clair is way bigger than Big Lake. It is 40km across! Big Lake isn’t even 1km across.
-We sang each other our national anthems
We think that both anthems are great!
We hope that we can Skype with the Techie Kids again!
Today we Skyped with Ms. Reid’s Grade 3 class from Kernersville, North Carolina. We found their town on Google Earth and were amazed by how big it was compared to our little town. Here is a picture
We got to find out a little about each other and are looking forward to another call soon! Here are some of the cool things we learned from them:
*They have an alligator as their school animal
* They have 5 traffic lights in their town
*800 people go to their school
*Silly Bandz are the hottest thing there right now (We looked them up on the internet)
*They have longer school days and we have a longer lunch
*They don’t have any class animals
Our friends from 2KJ in Australia made us a wonderful video message and posted it on their blog. We have wanted to Skype with them, but the time difference makes it impossible. We can’t wait to make them a video!
