In extension this term, we have been making beats for our PENN news! We were so excited to make music as it’s mostly part of our daily lives. All of us have been working hard and learning to make our beats; we have been learning learning new instruments and finding ways of how we could fit these in our song.

My song was more of a rock, energetic type beat that makes it a fit for our sports genre!!! Although we had some hard challenges like just finding what instruments to use or even trying to find out how to use them on the app. But there were also heaps of great parts to this project especially being able to collaborate and share our ideas wth other class mates. Music helps us unite and have fun, which is why I really like this project.

My song was made with instruments like electric guitars, pianos and even trumpets. At first I thought some instruments wouldn’t work in the beat that I was making, but then I really just tried to use them and I realised it wasn’t all that bad. The trumpets weren’t really an idea and then I just tried to have fun and used it, to find out it sounded great!

This project overall was fun and easy to learn from. Collaborating with others, making our own beat and playing around with the app was a great experience!

Dear Justine and KPMG helpers…

Us at Pt England loved the amazing activities you gave us. We enjoyed every second of it and learned a crazy amount of stuff! I was also amazed by all the things you guys did at KPMG, and the way you guys would do it. 

For example, your work community love each other as close friends and support one another like family. You all treated us with good care from the first time we walked in the building. We also knew when we walked through the door that this was a safe place to learn and experience great things.

My personal favourite activity was the music one. I really loved how we had the 3 topics to pick, but my group chose to do our own topic. We enjoyed spending time with our friends and learning exciting things at the same time! We sang the song, Anyone Else But You by The Moldy Peaches. 

Again, I’d like to thank you and your team for the fun stuff we did!

From John

This term our extension group has been working hard to make our Manaiakalani movie. We’ve been story boarding, practising our actions and editing. My main role was to edit, me and my friends Winter and Michael learned a lot and enjoyed our time.

Planning & Story boarding-

First we had to find a movie idea, my group thought of doing a parody of The  Truman Show. We put our ideas in and then we voted for which one we should use. the votes came in and… only three people voted for it; we talked over why it couldn’t work, and what we heard was pretty understandable. First we found out that we didn’t know what the plot would be since it’s at a school and we’d have to make him live at the school which would cause questions like, “Wouldn’t he be curious why other kids go home?” Moving on…

 Three ideas also tied for the most amount of votes. We split into groups and each group had to work with one of the three ideas. Our idea was to do a music video for the popular song, I AM By Stan Walker. While we were story boarding the scenes, we realised that people would mainly not understand because the lyrics was mostly Maori.

So our teacher, Mrs Burton, asked us to find a song that might be a great suit for our music video. Everyone was on the search until my friend Michael found it, a song that was perfect! A song that you’ve probably heard, From The Start By Laufey. We all quickly agreed with the idea and we went straight to story boarding AGAIN. After we figured out the scenes, Mrs Burton was going out with the class to start filming, but then she asked for two people to help with the editing, so me and Michael put our had up.

We used IMovie when we weren’t really used to it. Michael and I put the song in so we could match the lyrics, then we started editing! It was only scenes of kids in class imagining that they were in a certain situation.

This was our slides where we learnt about background understanding. This involved stuff like describing what a parody was, what is satire and who is going to be in the lyrics of our scenes.

For inquiry, me and a buddy had to make a poster of someone that’s a leader in our school. Either it’s a prefect, house captain or one of our teachers. Me and my friend Michelle worked together to make a poster about our friend Jaxon, who is also a prefect. We needed to explain what he does for the school, and how it helps. Enjoy!

On Wednesday room 4 & 5 went to our special Pt England reserve. This was continuing our term focus, Positive Difference. Each class in team 5 would go to different places in our community to help make it more positive. For example, room 1 went over to a Dementia healthcare centre and saw one of our teachers nana! We went out, split into twelve groups and grabbed our cleaning equipment.

All twelve of the groups split into two with six going right outside of the school gates and the other going to clean three different sections of the reserve. We started outside the black school gates and moved our way up from there. Me and my friend Robin found the jackpot by searching around the rugby field.

We moved onto the beach and it was awesome! We saw people mucking around but me and Robin knew what we were there for. We were there to help make a positive difference! We’d pick up big wood with nails hammered in it. I had a hard time taking the rubbish back but it was worth it, since we made a positive difference.

Later on, me and some other people would take all of the heavy rubbish bags into the big recycle bin.

This was amazing because of the feeling you have when your having fun with your friends and helping a community out at the same time!

This term, our literacy have been reading a book called Dawn Raid. We split it into different parts so we could read every week. We recreated a scene in the book by making a play.