By Room 11

Room 13

A plesiosaur is a member of the sea reptile family and the name Plesiosaurs means “close to lizard”.  A plesiosaur is not a dinosaur.  Instead it’s a sea reptile.

A plesiosaur has 2 front flippers, 2 back flippers, a short tail, sharp pointy teeth and a very long neck.

They were mostly found in Europe and probably lived about 200 million years ago. Plesiosaurs are found in shallow seas and even freshwater lakes.

They are very fast and they had curved teeth useful for catching fish, but not for chewing or crushing. It’s also likely that they caught and ate the squid-like creatures that existed at the time. Some plesiosaur fossils have stones preserved in the stomach area, showing that they swallowed stones (called gastroliths) to grind up food in their stomachs.

They were able to dive down, but they fed near the surface and had no need to go deep. Being reptiles they had to breathe air, so there would have to be good reason for them to leave the surface for a very long time.

Right now there are no more because they are extinct.

by RobNad

A Stick Insect

This morning my dad found a stick insect on our door.

He picked it up and put it in an old ice cream container with gladwrap on top.  He poked holes in the gladwrap with a fork.

I brought it to school and showed just about everybody in the school.  At morning tea Mr F took a photo of it.  I didn’t eat any morning tea because i was too busy with the stick insect.

A boy in another clasroom whacked the insect with his pink hat.  After that it has a broken leg.

After the bell went for the end of morning tea I stuck the stick insect on the tree outside Room 8.

I wonder if he’s still there?  He is!  We just went for a look and he has climbed higher up the tree.

by PedHun

Kiwi*

First we wrote a group report about kiwi and published it here on our wiki – some people added more and edited it.

We used a writing framework with the following headings-

Title – the name of the bird
Classification – the type of bird
Description – what it has or looks like
Location – where it can be found/where it lives
Dynamics – what it does
Did You Know?/Interesting/I Wonder? (optional)

Each student then chose a New Zealand bird to research, some worked in pairs.  We collected information using the framework. After proofreading the information was typed into a PowerPoint slideshow with one slide for each heading.

Then everyone drew an illustration and scanned it in.  Some were scanned as they were.  Some were cut out and scanned with a coloured paper background.  Some were cut out and scanned with a photo background from old National Geographic magazines.  A few had colours added or changed in Paint.net. Finally they were inserted into the slideshow.

The neat thing is, once you have the information you can do just about anything with it.  A PowerPoint slideshow is easily saved as an rtf [save as>other formats>save as type>outline/rtf].  Delete the headings, add an illustration, reformat the text and you’re done. A word document is easily cut and pasted into a blog post or wiki page.

That’s what will be happening here over the next couple of weeks- a big bunch of bird blog posts.

Mr F

*kiwi image painted in Artrage 2.5, inking added in Paint.net

Is this a Possum Skull?

Story coming…

Snowflake

On Thursday night dad told me that my pet lamb Snowflake died on Tuesday.  I was crying so much that I had to sit with dad. 

Me and Snowflake

Then I went to my room to get some pictures of her.  Then I went to the kitchen to get a rose.  I went down the steps across the yard to the woodshed where she used to live.  I opened the door and put the rose down and went back inside.

Me and Snowflake again

To cheer me up dad let me on Facebook.  My dad got me on bowling.  I got ten strikes for him.