Junior Fiction Judges:  Super Finn

Children’s Choice: Super Finn.

Picture book Judges: Rahui

Children’s Choice: The Cat’s Pyjamas

Non Fiction Judges:  Nice Day for a War

Overall winner:  Nice Day for a War.

You can link here and see the full list if you would like

So what do you think?  Personally I am sorry to see Just Jack missing from the list. How about you? Happy or not and why?

On the first day, we pretty much just experimented with the K’Nex, and some of us made some pretty amazing things. Joseph, Jordan and I, with the help of Daniel and Cameron, made a Giant Ferris Wheel. Also a type of Carnival was made by Teegan, Simone, Emma, Miggy, and Charlotte. Sadly, no pictures were taken of the finished products, so you won’t be able to see them. But I can assure you, they were TOTALLY AWESOME!

Another project that Emma worked on was a turtle. They made this from instructions and I think that it looks pretty cool. I think that this one of the only things made totally from instruction sheets. Though I did see something else that I wanted to make, but it looked to hard and I wouldn’t have finished it before the K’Nex were packed away. Here is a look at Emma’s turtle:

;

Another class project we did in groups was making vehicles that had wheels. I made mine with William, Jordan, and Harshil. Then we gave it a name: The Kart Of Awesomeness!!! Then jordan put a flag on it with the name and added a (c) symbol after it. (For fun). Then we chose 3 competitions to enter it in. The options were:

• Coolest (Looked the coolest)
• Strongest (Broke the least when drove down a ramp into a table on it’s side) (My group were responsible for testing this)
• Fastest (Won a race)
• Longest (Longest car built)
• Straitest – Best to follow a line along the ground)

One last project we did, was making structures with as many shapes in them as we could. My group made a very awesome looking shape, made another, and connected them. Finally we added wheels. On side’s wheels were larger to cover for the lean of the structure. Sadly, no pictures were taken of these so you can’t see these either.

The very last thing we did was do a thorough tidy up. This was unbelievably chaotic! We literally were tidying until the bell rang. I still can’t believe we finished putting the exact right amount of K’Nex into the right areas of each individual box! But sadly, that was the end of Room 8′s K’Nex adventure.

By Antonio

You are now all set up with school emails, and for those of you who don’t yet have your emails Mr Terita now has your usernames and passwords.

Here is a screencast to show you how to log in and start up a basic document and share it with the people you are working with. Of course only one person will start it up and share it, the others will then be able to click on it when they click into documents.

Here is the tutorial on how to log on.  Someone in the class might like to make a tutorial about how to add a picture or photo to a document.  A challenge for one of you.  Add it to the class blog when you have made it so everyone knows how.
When watching this tutorial make sure you click on the enlarge button so that you can see what I am showing you.
 

Here are the teams -

SENIOR TEAM ONE                      SENIOR TEAM TWO              JUNIOR TEAM

Me! (Simone)                                 Breellen                                      Lauren

Teegan                                             Vicky                                            Clemie

Siabhaon                                         Daniel                                           Jasmine

Joseph                                             Jordan                                          Evalina

Connor                                            Antonio                                        Therese

Here are our results for the quiz -

The Junior Team came 6th (which was second to last – but 6th sounds better).

Senior Team Two came 3rd, which was really great. They got 49 points in the end.

Senior Team One (my team!!!) came 1ST!!! YAY! Aaaaand we only had 4 people because Joseph just HAD to get sick that day. But we thrashed everyone! Actually, that’s not true because we only won by half a point, but at least we won. We got 58 and a half. Tomorrow (Friday) we will be going in the finals.  Two years ago, my Mastermind team got in the finals and we placed second! So hopefully we do just as good, possibly better!

Goodbye!

Simone  8)

During the holidays, my dad and I had a go at cutting down the huge gum trees down the side of our house. Dad’s idea was for him to get the ladder and climb to the top of the tree with a long rope, and then tie it tightly to the gum tree and then cut it down with his chainsaw while I pulled the tree in the right direction so that it wouldn’t hit anything.

Seeing that I was really worried about what way the tree was going to fall, dad told me that he was going to cut into the tree at a precise angle so that it would fall in the direction that I pulled the rope; that didn’t really help because that meant that the tree was going to be falling towards me!

There were seven trees that we had to cut down; the first 5 were easy to cut because there was nothing in the way of them. The 2 other gum trees were a lot harder because they were about 2 metres higher than all the other gum trees, also because of the smaller trees in front of them.

As Dad sawed through the biggest gum tree of the seven, the weight of the tree pulled it in the wrong direction towards the neighbour’s house. As the tree came crashing down I watched with squinted eyes as the tree broke through part of our black wooden fence nearly putting a hole through the neighbour’s house but was braced by the strength of the fence. Lucky for us the neighbours weren’t home.

Dad and I after a lot of pushing, cutting and pulling finally moved the tree onto the grassy lawn away from the neighbour’s house. After all that I was just pleased that the tree hadn’t hurt anyone or broken through someone’s house and went off to help stack the used to be gum trees.

Joseph

Here is the link to Screenr