The best moments of 2015!

Probably my favourite (and also everybody other year 8's) favourite moment of this year was camp. We did so much fun stuff at camp and my favourite activities was probably caving and the overnight camp.

Big day out

My favourite big day out was probably last years when we went to that indoor sports place. For this year I think that we might be going to one of these places

• Zealandia 
• Zoo
• A bird place
• Pool
• Some sports place

It's always hard every year to find a place where over 250 children can go to so I hope that the teachers have found a fun place to go to for our last year at this school.

 

College

College is just around the corner and I'm looking forward to it. My older brother James has said many good things about St Pat's and I can't wait to get there. Some of the things that I want to achieve in year 9 is to meet new people and probably get into a basketball team. Some of challenges in year 9 that I might find is the homework. James always says that he gets so much homework but I am a bit doubtful. On the first week of being a year 7 James told me that there were so many tasks and that I wouldn't finish them all. I was so scared I wouldn't finish them so I took all of my task home on Monday and I got them all done by Wednesday morning. (That my record of finishing my tasks)
Anyway the other thing that I might find challenging at St Pat's is learning where everything is. Even though St Pat's isn't the biggest school ever I think it will be hard for me to remember where everything is for the first few weeks. All in all I am very excited for college and I can't wait to see where it takes me.

Book Week

Last week was book week and we did a lot of fun activities to do with books and these are 3 favourites.

The Book Character parade

As we usually do each year on the Friday of book week everybody dressed up in different costumes and we do a parade on the courts. My "costume" wasn't the best and all I had that related to books was a batman t-shirt. This year since I was a house captain I got to judge all the costumes which was really hard because there were so many good ones.

Kate De Goldi

On Tuesday we had a author called Kate De Goldi come in to talk to us. She talked about how she got into writing and all the books we had read. I found it very interesting that her writing when she was at school was just like mine and just because she had become an author didn't mean she had always been great at writing.

Golden ticket

My favourite activity that we did for book week was the golden ticket. It was based  of the golden ticket in Charlie and the chocolate factory. All the intermediate classes did this and the teachers would hide the golden tickets somewhere around the school and post clues on the blog. Whoever found the golden ticket could take it to there teacher in exchange of a prize.



Thanks for reading!

Hairy Maclary

When I was young I used to read a series of books called Hairy Maclary. The stories are based of a dog called Hairy Maclary and his friends who are also dogs. The book was written by Lynley Dodd who is a New Zealand author. The first Hairy Maclary was writen in 1983 and the most recent in 2012. I used to like these books because of the great illustrations and all the rhymes. I'm not to sure when I read these books but I think I was about 5 or 6.

AFL

 

Last week we started doing AFL. We had some people who played AFL to come to our school and teach us the basics of playing AFL. We learnt how to kick the ball to pass and to shoot. We also learnt some of the rules or AFL and the techniques to holding and kicking the ball. Some of thing that I learnt about AFL are:

• The fields used for AFL are much larger than a rugby field
• AFL is one of the highest attended sports in the world
• To pass to your teammates you have to kick or punch the ball

Favourite Game!

My favourite game is a game called football heads. There are many different variants of the game for the different football leagues like the Bundesliga and the BPL. Thomas found the game a few weeks ago on accident and we have played it ever since. The game is a bit like Soccer Physics but you get more control over your players and in my opinion. I like this game because you can choose what player and all in all its very fun.

This a picture of the game

Holidays

During the holidays I went to see 2 movies The Martian and The Scorch Trials. I went to see The Scorch Trials with Bernard, Renzo, Anthony, Paolo, Arthur, James and I. We went because it was Bernard's goodbye party because he was going back to Papua New Guinea. The Scorch Trials was an okay movie and I would rate it a 7 out of ten.

The other Movie I saw was The Martian, it was a great movie. I saw it with my Brother and my Mum. I would rate the move a 8.5 out of ten and I would recommend this movie to everyone especially if you like sci fi movies. The movie is about some Astronauts on Mars collecting samples. Then a storm comes and they are forced to leave. As they are getting to the ship one of the astronauts, Mark Watney is hit by debris and the crew think he is dead so they leave without them. The rest of the film is about him trying to get back to earth and surviving on Mars with limited supplies.

                                                                                                                                                

Art!

Over the past few weeks the entire schools has been working hard to produce many pieces of art for the art week. Art week was a big success and all the art looks very good.

The X wing
 

This is the x wing that Rm 12 made, it took many hours to make but in the end it looked great and It was a favourite at the art exhibition. I made some of the wings and did some of the papier mache. To make the X wing we first had to make all the parts out of chicken wire then papier mache it. The papier mache took forever but after that we painted the parts and hot glue some of the parts together. lastly we stuck all the parts together using metal poles to hole the wings in x shape.

The planet landscape 

The planet landscape was made by all 3 intermediate classrooms and was based of the Mars. Was made very quickly only 2 days (I think). We also added small aliens on them that were based of darklings. 

Poems!

For the past few weeks we have been learning about how to write poems. We have wrote a few different types of poems including I hear poems and emotion poems but my favourite would have to be my haiku poems.

The wind

howls in the cold night  

the trees are unprotected

Lonely Earth

Clouds fill the blue sky

Spinning slowly

I like these poems because I think that the Haikus were the poems that I wrote the best and the others that I wrote were a bit rubbish.

Anyway thank your for reading my post and goodbye 

Famous Artist!

For this weeks task we had to write about one of our favourite artists and since I am a massive comic book fan I chose Jack Kirby. Jack Kirby was a American artist that drew for many comic book companies including Marvel, DC, and more. He has drawn many famous heroes including Captain America, X men, the Hulk, the Fantastic four and so on. He also helped create some heroes such as Iron Man, Thor and Captain America.

Sportsfest!

(Before)

This week on Wednesday some of the schools in Wellington will be competing in a sportsfest. There a few sports that your can play including basketball, dodgeball, football, netball, table tennis, and badminton. I chose to play dodgeball and I got put in the dodgeball boys team. I think that if we play fairly and play well then we will all enjoy ourselves and have lots of fun.

(After)

Yesterday we had our dodge ball Sportsfest tournament. The rules were a bit different than the one that we use at school but we quickly adapted and we played very well. Both of our teams came 3rd which was pretty good considering that we had such good competition. There were many teams from schools all over Wellington such as Raroa, Postgate, Kahurangi, Newlands, Holy Cross and more.

If there was anything I would like to be changed about the dodgeball is probably having more courts to play on because we had to wait a long time between games. I would also like to have some more balls on the court.

New Flag!

For the past few months the Government has been deciding what flag we should have to replace our current one. Personally I think the entire thing is a big waste of money and that our current flag is good enough but out of the 40 designs that have been selected I think that some of them are really good and these are my three favourites.




This flag is called the Black Jack and was created by Mike Davidson. I like this design because has the Union Jack but it still incorporates a Maori design.




This flag is called the silver fern and was created by Kyle Lockwood like this design because it still has the southern cross from our current flag and I also includes the fern, a proud symbol of  New Zealand.




This flag is called the Unity Fern and was created by Paul Jackways. I like this flag because it got all the colours from our old flag and it also includes a fern one of the most commonly known New Zealand symbol, the fern




This flag is called the Unity Koru and was created by Paul Densem. I like this flag because it includes the colours from our old flag and it also includes a koru in the middle which is one of New Zealand's native plants


All in all my favourite flag out of the all the 4 that I have written about would have to be the Black Jack because it incorporates a Maori design while still having our old flag's appearance.

Why we should change the flag

• Changing the flag would symbolize our independence from Britain
• The new flag would incorporate strong Maori influence
• Our current flag is often confused by flags of other countries especially Australia's.
• The new flag could symbolize a change for the better for New Zealand

Why we should not change the flag

• It cost taxpayers 27 million dollars even if we decide to keep our old flag
• Our soldiers in fought and died under our current flag
• Our current flag is a New Zealand artefact
• I like the old flag and so do 99.9999999% of people

Anyway thanks for reading and comment down below what is your favourite flag!

Art !!!

What I'm good at

I think that the best things I'm good at in art are drawing and sketching. We have just finished sketching our astronauts and I think that my one is quite good.

What I would like to work on

I think I would like to work on painting and using pastels because I usually make a mess of my art work.

Art ideas

For the art exhibition I think that we should make model sci fi space ships and maybe some people could make models of famous space ships from movies or books e.g. Star Wars/Star Trek.

Dinner!

Stan Lee

For this weeks post we were told to write about 2 people that we would invite to dinner and what questions we would ask them. Since I am a massive Marvel fan my first choice would be the one and only Stan Lee. Some of the questions I would ask Stan Lee what was his favourite Marvel comic character he created and I would also ask him were he got all of his ideas for all the characters he created.

Anthony Horowitz 

For my second person I would invite Anthony Horowitz because he is my favourite author. Anthony Horowitz wrote the Alex Rider series and the power of 5 series. I would ask Anthony Horowitz how he got the ideas for his book and I would also ask him what was his favourite book to write.

Grandparents and relatives

Since all of my relatives live in the Philippines I've only seen them a few times and usually only on holidays. We went to the Philippines in 2013 and 2014 and we spent a lot of time with our relatives doing fun things. My favourite time of both of the holidays was when we went to a theme park with and went on this really cool looking roller coaster with loops and sharp turns. Only me James, Mum and Joshua (one of my cousins) went on the roller coaster and it was really fun. My other cousins were scared and went on this other (less-scary) roller coaster which was fine by me apart from the fact that the line was about 2 miles long full of parents and their eager toddlers and we had to wait about a 45 minutes for them to have a ride. After wards we wanted to go onto the ferris wheel called the Pampanga eye with the whole family but my cousins were scared so we got hot dogs instead. Another of my favourite memories is when we went to the 3rd largest mall in the world called SM Mall of Asia. We only went with me James, Mum and my Grandmother. The mall had a ice rink in the centre but its was like $50 dollars a hour for per person so we went bowling instead.

Anyway those were some of my most favourite times with my grandparents and relatives and I hope you enjoyed reading and...

Holidays!

Ice skating

I

One of the things I did these holidays was go ice skating with Paulo and Joaquin. James and I were actually pretty good at ice skating and we "taught" Paulo how to skate too. (By "taught" I mean pushing Paulo in to the middle of the rink and leaving him to skate his way back to the safety of the fence.)  Joaquin also didn't now how to skate and he was using a red pusher to balance him so we dragged him into the middle of the rink and then took his pusher away and left him in the middle of the rink. Now you may think this was is mean but eventually it worked. :)

Moustache Batman

Sleep-over + Armageddon

On Thursday we went to Anthony's house for a sleep over. At his house we played games for way too long than we should have with Will Foy who came a few hours later. Finally at 10:30 we fell asleep. The next morning after we woke up and played yet some more games until Thomas came. Before leaving for Armageddon James, Anthony and Will got changed in to their costumes and Anthony suggested that I wear a Batman onesie and put a Luigi moustache on but I said NO WAY. Armageddon was ok but most of the stuff was very over priced so we only got a few things each.  I was disappointed with the zombie run as after we did it we didn't get any more bullets with our free guns. I guess it was a marketing tactic so we would have do buy extra bullets and by the way I highly doubt that those free guns cost $15.

Anyway that was how my holiday went. What was your favourite thing you did these holidays?

 

Nairnville!

For the past term we have been we have been going down to Nairnville every Thursday to do sports. For the first 6 weeks we did gymnastics and the next 2 we did rippa rugby. This week we will be having our second session of football. My favourite part of Nairnville was doing football and rippa rugby. I have learnt a lot about the sports that we have played especially spreading out when playing rugby and football.

One thing I would like to happen is to have one session where we play games like kill the cone and capture the flag etc. Also in the next lesson of football I would like to play on the turf because it can get crowded inside the small gym.

German!

We have been learning the German Language at school for the past few terms. I have learnt a lot about German but mostly the numbers up to 20 and positive and negative words. I may continue to learn German next year because I would like to visit Germany in the future but I think there is only a few languages you can learn in year 9 and I'm not sure if German is one of them. Anyway I have really liked learning about German and I have learnt a lot.

EPIC values

At school we have 4 values called our EPIC values. EPIC is an acronym for empathy, perseverance, integrity and creativity. We use these values a lot at school, especially empathy for when someone gets hurt during morning tea and lunch. I think that the easiest value for me is creativity and the most difficult is perseverance because sometimes it can be hard to carry on and not to just quit when times get tough. There is a certificate for people seen showing our EPIC values around the school.

 I think I have shown perseverance will working with my science fair as my first project idea didn't work and I was forced to create a new one. I was really bummed about my first idea not going to plan especially since it took me ages to think of it and I had it all prepared but I persevered and I thought of a new idea and I am now back on track. Sometimes empathy can be a bit hard for me especially with little kids. When a little kid gets hurt and I come over to help them it can become a bit awkward as they are very unpredictable and I never manage to think of the right thing to say. Integrity is quite easy for me because I am usually quite honest and I use creativity often when I draw things.

The Enemy

Recently I have been reading a book called The Enemy by Charles Higson. The book is set in London and the plot is about a virus that turns anyone over the age of 15 into zombie-like creatures called grown-ups and all the children have to survive against the odds. 1 day a kid meets up with a group of children living together in an abandoned grocery store and tells them that they can come with him back to the Buckingham Palace to start a new life with larger group of children who have made a mini fortress in which they can all live in. I'm not going to tell anything else about the book because of spoilers but it is a bit gory but at the same time quite exciting.

Quote from the book: "If a wolf attacks his sheep, the shepherd kills the wolf, but he eats the sheep when he is hungry".

This quote tells us about how the characters in the book don't trust each other. Even if they help you  one day they can turn on you the next. The book is full of uncertainty between the characters and who can they trust.

The Galapagos Islands and Evolution

This term at school we have been learning about evolution and the Galapagos. My favourite part of learning the topic were the David Attenborough documentaries because they were very interesting. We also learnt about how all the islands on earth formed and about the dinosaurs. I very much like this topic and learning about adaptation and all the amazing animals though i wish we could have done more work on the evolution of other animals from other parts of the world asides from the Galapagos islands My suggestion for what we should do for our next topic is either ancient Greece or ancient Rome or maybe WW2.  

Responsibilities

This year I was able to get 2 responsibilities around the school which were house captain and sports leader. To get a role or responsibility you had to write a letter to the teacher about why you would be the best for the job.

I really enjoy being a house captain because we can help out arranging school events with Mrs Taylor and the other house captains. Some of the other things we do as house captains are: counting up the house points from the other classrooms and read them out in during assemblies.

My second role I have is being a sports leader Every day a different group of sports leaders have to take the PE cart from the shed and roll it down to the courts were people can get out sports equipment. We also have to pump the balls if they are getting flat and coach younger students for sports tournaments such as rippa rugby. I wouldn't change much about the role apart from finding a way to make taking down the cart easier because sometimes  it gets a bit tricky.

ASB get wise

On Wednesday we had a person from the ASB get wise program come to our school and he taught some classes in our school about how to get better with managing our money. His name was Vane and he was quite funny and entertaining. I think that the talk was worthwhile and I learnt what PIN means and the difference between between an Eftpos card and a Credit card. I think that I do manage my money well and one think that I could improve about it is keeping my money in the back so I can receive extra interest. My favourite part of the entire thing is when Vane gave us a few minutes to plan a small business with a partner. Me and Thomas decided to make a business to grow and sell tomatoes and we called the business "Walmart" which was really funny. Over all I found the talk worthwhile and I learnt a lot from it.

Mission Fair 2015

Last Friday we had Mission Fair! For mission fair we had to get into groups and set up a stall to run for an hour to raise money for Vanuatu after cyclone Pam. In my group we had Sam, Frankie, Max, Thomas and William and we were running a Pizza and drinks stall.

I think that our stall when well apart from Dominos being really slow with delivery. All our pizza sold out in less than 10 minutes so that was a success. Something I would change about our stall would be ordering our pizzas earlier and ordering more pizza because many people were asking us if we had any left after we had sold out.

In conclusion Misson Fair was a big success and we raised over $2300 for the rebuild in Vanuatu

Anzac day

This is where the Anzacs landed 100 years ago

On the 25th of April this year it was the 100th anniversary of the Anzac landings in Galipoli. Many people commemorated the event by going to services in New Zealand and in Turkey. At school we learnt more about Galipoli and some interesting facts such as:

-The Anzacs landed in the wrong location and instead flat terrain to faced a massive mountain.
-The British general commanding the Anzacs was horrible and many soldiers died because of his commands

- The Anzac were fighting for the Dardanelles, so the Allied powers could get a ice-free route into Russia.
-They were also fighting to put Turkey out of the war.

Many people wear poppies to commemorate the Anzacs
because they grew on the battle fields after the war

-When the Anzacs landed the were met by Turkish soldiers.
- Many soldiers died from diseases, infection or shrapnel.

Unfortunately I did not attend any services this year but I am very grateful for what they did and I enjoyed learning about them.

Comment what was your favourite fact you learnt about the Anzacs that you didn't already know before.

Back from camp!

Last week the year 8's came back from year 8 camp. The camp we went was Hillary outdoors (formally OPC) We did many fun activities such as caving, high-ropes and tramping.

My favourite activity was caving because we learned a lot about the types of rocks and the glowworms.

Completing the high-ropes was my proudest moment out of the entire week. I only did 2 high rope courses and my favourite was the wobbly bridge.

One other thing that I liked about camp was story time because many people had funny and interesting stories.

The easiest activity in camp was the flying fox because we didn't have to do anything but marvel at the view.  I also liked spotlight because it was fun even through I didn't make it to the centre.

My favourite moment at camp was every moment. (apart from trying to get to sleep with 11 other boys in the same room) I really enjoyed my self at camp and I know the that year 7's will have a great time next year.

What was your favourite part of camp? (or EOTC for the year 7's) comment below

P.S. sorry for short post spent too long writing that annoying recount.

Teamwork

Cricket Project

Last week we finished our cricket world cup project that we had to do with a buddy. As my buddy I  had Ystefano. The other year 8 boys had some trouble with their buddies but me and Ystefano worked just fine. Our country that we had for our country was England. I was really excited when I picked our country because I though it was going to be interesting to learn about the people who invented cricket and the history of the sport. Unfortunately that creators or the first players of the sport were not known which disappointed me. Me and Ystefano and me had a system so that he would take the poster and do it at home and I would do the PowerPoint at home which made things a lot easier. I found out that many other groups had problems with this and one partner would end up do basically all of the work. I think that Ystefano did a great job with the poster and that our team work was a success.

Maori artwork

In my Maori artwork group I had Jarden, Thomas and William W. For the project we had to draw an artwork from a Maori legend. We chose the Sun from the story of when Maui slowed the Sun. . Are artwork only consisted of the Sun in the middle and a design on the bottom with borders. Me and William did a lot on the design and shape of the sun and we all did the colouring together because it was the most time-consuming part of the entire project. I think our team work was great because we all helped each other to do the harder parts of the artwork and I was impressed and satisfied with the outcome.

Some things I learnt this week...

Cricket world Cup

This week I learnt 2 interesting facts about the country I am studying. I learnt that England consumes the most tea than any other country in the world. I also learned that cricket was supposedly invented by some children living in south England in the 16th century. Cricket was probably first played with a thick stick and a rock until proper gear was invented. 

Someone in my class

One thing  I learnt about someone in my class was the Catherine M loves to read books. She has like already finished her chart and I have only read 2 fiction books and some non fiction books. She also is good with art and finishing her tasks early.

Something else

A few days ago I read a fact online that the 3x3 Rubik's cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different positions that is can be turned and twisted into. If every second you turned your Rubik's cube into a new unique position it would take over 1400 trillion years to get through all 43 quintillion of them. Even if you started this project at the big bang you still would only be 0.001% complete. If you thought that the 3x3 had lots of unique positions a 7x7 has 19,500,551,183,731,307,835,329 ,126,754,019,748,794,904,992,692,043,434,567,152,132,912,323,232,706,135,469,180,065,278,712,755,853,360,682,328,551,719,137,311,299,993,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 19.5 duoquinquagintillion for short) different positions! There are more different positions in a 7x7 that atoms in 10⁸⁰ visible universes! (10⁸⁰  just means 1 with 80 zeros after it.) 

Comment below if you found this post interesting and

  

My Interests

One of my favourite pastimes is playing with my 3x3x3 Rubix's cube. Lately I haven't been playing with it because I just haven't found the time to do so. I also have a 4x4x4 and this weird pyramid puzzle which both I do not know how to solve because I haven't found an easy algorithm to use. My fastest time for the 3x3x3 cube is something like 54.9 seconds. I think that the time is ok but the fastest can do it 10 times faster. 

I first got interested in the Rubix’s cube last year in about July-August when I watched a video on YouTube about it. I found an old cube lying around and started to learn how to solve. My first attempt took me an hour and a half to complete my first solve because I had mucked up the algorithms so many times but I was still proud of mysel

 

My next interest comes from my older brother James. A lot of you probably already know that James was a massive Marvel/DC fan and I guess it runs through the blood. I and my bother watch many Marvel and DC TV shows such as Marvels agents of shield, Agent Carter, Gotham, Arrow and the Flash. My brother also watches Constantine but I can’t be bothered. 

I and my brother also read comic books. We have a whole stack of them but we also get some from the library. The movie I and many other people are also looking forward to this year is Avengers 2 age of Ultron coming out on the 23rd of April. I just hope Marvel has made this movie good because I have been waiting for it ever since the last one.

Anyway thank you for reading!

Back to school.......

I know that most people hate coming back to school every year and just going to school in general but these first few weeks being at school have actually been quite fun. Being a year 8 is really fun, I don't know why but for some reason it seems much better than being a year 7. Something that is different from last year that I like is the way that Friday is packed with really fun activities such as swimming and Dodge ball. 

I love the task system it’s a lot better than what we used to do as primary students. I like the way that you could choose what tasks you want to do now and which to do later as homework. Without the task system doing homework was hard because we could only do certain subjects at certain times. I also think that the task system is great because it develops our time management skills in preparation for college.

Dodge ball is really fun this year because instead of being the inexperienced people the year 8's are the now the best players in the school. I thought that since we have 3 classes that it was going to be really hard to play dodge ball but it's working out really well having the class not playing to collect all the balls and kick them back into the court.

If there was one thing I would change about how the intermediate syndicate is run is to have more games of dodge ball with the other classes every normal day not just reward time because it’s not as exiting just to play with your class mates. These games could just be practice games and winning a game would not give your classroom a point.  

Anyway I hope that you are all having a great first few weeks back at St Ben's and I hope that all you year 7's out there are coping with the task system well.