On Thursday we Skyped with our friends in B4. It was the last day of the school year in New Zealand and we were so glad that Mrs. McKenzie and her class could squeeze in a Skype call.
Mrs. McKenzie and B4 were a part of the Our World, Our Stories project. We also have connections with B4 going back to when we first started blogging. Last year the grade threes even wrote partner Storybirds with B4. Chatting today was like talking to good friends.
During our call we had a chance to talk about Our World, Our Stories, sing our traditional songs for each other (and a Christmas carol or two), compare wildlife, and share how we spend Christmas.
We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and holiday break! We can’t wait to blog with you again in the new year!
Earlier this term we started a wonderful collaborative writing project with our friends in Mrs. McKenzie’s class in New Zealand. We were each given a buddy or two from Mrs. McKenzie’s class that we would write our Storybirds with.
Our class started by picking some art work that we thought our buddies would like and then we wrote the first page. Next we passed the stories to our New Zealand friends. It was so exciting waiting to see what our friends would write. Sometimes we were surprised by the twists and turns the stories would take and other times it seemed like our buddies had been reading our minds!
Writing a story with someone on the other side of the world, without being able to talk to them, taught us to be flexible. We had to reread the story each time it was passed back to us and then choose a picture and write the next bit that would fit with the direction the story was taking.
We hope that we get a chance to write collaborative stories again! Here are two of the stories that were written. To see the other partner Storybirds you can visit B4’s wiki and click on each student’s page. The 2/3’s will be adding the Storybirds to their blogs later this week.
On Thursday two very special visitors arrived in our classroom. Our friends, the Super 7 Scoopers from New Zealand, sent their class mascot Trev for a visit. He made a couple stops before coming to see us. We can’t wait to teach him about life on our island before sending him off on his next big adventure. Trev brought all sorts of cool things with him. He has two great bandanas, some pins, New Zealand tattoos, a book about Dunedin and his own scrapbook to keep track of his adventures.
Gill the goldfish also arrived from our new friends the Gill-Villeans in Ontario, Canada. Gill brought us maple syrup and maple taffy lollipops. On Wednesday we are going to have a class pancake breakfast so that we can sample the maple syrup. Oceana has taken Gill home this weekend and we can’t wait to find out all about their visit on Monday.
We hope that Trev and Gill will have fun with us and will keep each other company in the classroom each night when we go home.
What do you think Trev and Gill might do when we go home for the evening?Maybe we will write, The Adventures of Trev and Gill đ
This morning we got a fantastic surprise in the mail. Our friends, Mrs. McKenzie and the students in B4, sent us a very special package. We want to thank them for the wonderful book and beautiful bookmark! It was such a huge surprise.
The book is called After Dark: Creatures of the New Zealand Forest. We loved the pictures of all the animals, that it rhymes, that it is a guessing game, and that we got to learn so many cool facts! We hadn’t even heard of most of the animals in the book. We also loved that everyone in the class signed the book.
This book is going to be a very popular addition to our class library!
Here are some of the things we are wondering and want to find out more about:
Jordan-I would like to know how many kakapos are left in New Zealand. Are they endangered?
Sophie-I was wondering how many kiwi birds are in New Zealand. I am also wondering how big they are?
Niall-I was wondering how the kiwi bird got its name. Is it because it kind of looks like a kiwi fruit?
Quang- I think it is cool that the kiwi doesn’t have any wings or a tail. I didn’t know that there were birds without wings!
Justin-I am wondering why kiwi birds have such long beaks.
Lily-I am wondering how big the forest gecko is. I think it is cool that he has no eyelids.
Dante-How many New Zealand animals are endangered?
Sahara-Are there a lot of forest geckos in New Zealand? I think it is cool that they can shed their tail and grow one back!
Fay-I am wondering how the kauri snail doesn’t hurt his own mouth with his tongue being covered in thousands of tiny sharp teeth…OUCH!
Silkence-I think it is cool that the gecko doesn’t lay eggs, but gives birth to live young.
Ana-Do giant wetas get in your houses at night? I would scream if I found one in my bed!
Kennedy-Why does the Archey’s frog not like the water? How do the tadpoles survive without being in water?
Oceana- Why does the Archey’s frog carry tadpoles on his back?
Karin-I am wondering how the kauri snail got his name.
We can’t thank B4 and Mrs. McKenzie enough! We’ll read it again and again and again!
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!
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!
Yesterday we got this comment on our Blog from Mrs. McKenzie and her year 2, 3, 4 class:
Hello, we are a class of Year 2,3 and 4 children in New Zealand. We have just started blogging this year and are excited at the idea of communicating with children in other countries.
We have just over 200 students aged from 5 years old up to 18 years old in our school, which is called Reefton Area School.
We would love to hear from you all.
We wrote them back today and are very excited about getting to learn more about their class and about New Zealand! It is so exciting to be meeting children from different parts of the world. We hope that you will go read their blog http://openthedoortob4.blogspot.com/ too.
