KABOOM! WHISTLE! POP! in Room 1

Room 1 really enjoyed the visit from Bob Bickerton. We were all amazed by all the instruments he could play and all the great sounds they made. Ralph, our class mascot enjoyed listening to the romantic music of the harp the best!



Our first activity to make sense of sound was to learn about our five senses. The children made a wonderful 3D eye, ear, hand, nose and a mouth. We shared these at assembly and shared our knowledge of the five senses.











Next, we became sound detectives. We completed many science experiments to find out more about sound. We used balloons, straws, rulers and even the bath! The experiments were lots of fun!

At the moment we are making musical instruments. We have made pan pipes and drums so far and we are going to make more instruments next week.







Stay tuned for more KABOOM! WHISTLE! POP! news from Room 1.

How The Room 3 Learning Team reflected.

After the performance by Bob Bickerton The Room 3 Learning Team reflected with pipe cleaners. We each created our favourite instrument from the performance then we shared them as a class. The students discussed what sound it made, how the sound was made and what they liked about that sound it made when they shared the instrument they'd created with pipe cleaners to the class.



We also took some quiet time and listened to the sound around us inside and outside our classroom. Later that day the students recorded their wonderings onto our wondering wall in the class. We will work on finding answers to these wonderings throughout our learning journey.

A great tuning in experience.

On Tuesday 6th May 2008 at 9am the brilliance of Bob Bickerton could be heard at Pine Hill School. This was a whole school tuning in activity for our inquriy: Kaboom! Pop! Whistle! How do we make sense of sound.

To tune us in we had a performance by the talented Bob Bickerton. He brought along a variety of instruments and played each of them for the students. He also provided a great explanation of how each instrument created its sound. The students were exposed to a variety of musical instruments, some instruments they had seen before or knew of them, while others were very new to us.
Some of the instruments Bob Bickerton played was ...

A Kazoo, a guitar, a violin, irish bagpipes, a koauau, a harp, a flute, a tin whistle, a bottle, a pan pipe, a swany whistle, an accordion, a harp, a hand drum and we used our voices in song.

After the performance each class went back to their own rooms to reflect.

Our Latest Inquiry

This term we launched into our latest inquiry...

As part of this inquiry we are learning to be sound detectives and develop key understandings about the phenomena of sound and then explore this further through musical instruments. The key understandings we want the student to have by the end of this unit of work are...
Key Understanding 1: What is sound?
Key Understanding 2: How does the ear hear sound?
Key Understanding 3: Where does sound happen?
Key Understanding 4: How are different sounds made?
Key Understanding 5: What are the different instruments and the sounds they make?

Please come back and check out our blog entries as we undertake our latest whole school learning journey. You will find out what is happening in each class and what is happening as a school as our students develop these key understandings.

Our Magnificant Mosaic of OUR WORLD

This magnificent mosaic mural was created by children of Pine Hill School in Term 4, 2007. This artwork was created in response to a term inquiry into “How are we responsible for our planet?” During this inquiry children learnt about the environment of Antarctica, Penguins and Global Warming. This artwork is a response to this learning and a way of taking action to share our learning with our community.

Keep New Zealand Beautiful at Pine Hill School

On Wednesday 12th September we got into groups and we went around some streets and picked up rubbish. When we got back we sorted the rubbish into categories. The people that sorted the rubbish were Mikayla, Nathan, Luke, Anita, some teachers and Dione. The categories we sorted rubbish into were Glass, Wood, Plastic, Paper, Cardboard, Metal, Food and other. We had to wear gloves for safety.

We watched Happy Feet to find about the important messages and to learn more about the environment. We did an activity to write down the messages (Tic Tac Toe) We shared some of the important messages.


We had fun trying to help keep New Zealand beautiful and the other children had fun too.

Thank you for reading Dione and Patricia's Blog

Why do you think the earth is sick?

Over the last few weeks we have been thinking about why our world is getting sick. We have been learning about global warming, the greenhouse effect and pollution. Here are our ideas about why the world is getting sick:

* People are throwing garbage around the world.
* People cut down trees.
* People wreck bushes and flowers.
* There is poisonous stuff called pollution.
* There is too much smoke.
* People are hurting animals. They are dying.