Goodbye and good luck!

Our year has come to an end. What a fantastic class its been. On Tuesday we went to Ms Jones's place for morning tea then walked back to school through Seeley's Gully. Here we are on the deck at Ms Jones's house. And here we are just before leaving each other for the summer holidays. Best wishes to everyone who made Room 13 a great place this year for a wonderful holiday and a return to school in 2017 refreshed and ready to make a new community of learners in their next class. happy Christmas everybody!

Flax Flower

The Holes

Our class went down to Putikitiki. We dug a good hole. We found lots of worms in the hole.🍂

Ruakuri Reserve Field Trip

Yesterday we went to Ruakuri Scenic Reserve, near Waitomo. It was a fantastic trip.
We were very lucky with the weather. It didn't rain.

Here are some images of the day.

Blackbird

Ms Jones saw a Blackbird get hit by a car while she was walking to school.
She brought the dead Blackbird to school so we could look at it up close. Usually we just see birds in the distance.

We examined its wings. It has long pin feathers and shorter downy feathers.

The body is covered with soft downy feathers.
It has three toes pointing forwards and a long toe behind to help it grip branches.

We talked about how the wings enable the bird to fly.
We  think the reason that birds can fly so well is because they are very light and their wings beat the air the way our arms beat the water when we swim. We use our arms in water keeps up afloat.
Birds use their wings in the air to keep them aloft.

We decided to bury it in the Butterfly Garden.

We placed it in the hole and covered it with earth.
We marked the spot and decided to dig it up later in the year to see if it has left a skeleton.

Soil layers

We are learning about what is under the ground this term.

We read a book called Sam and Dave Dig a Hole. 

We decided to dig a hole on Putikitiki to see what is under the grass we play on.

First Ms Jones dug a square with the spade and removed the top layer of grass.

We were surprised to find that not far beneath the surface there was fine white sand.
We wondered if the river had once flowed through Putikitiki gully and left river sand behind.

This photo shows the thin top layer of topsoil and the white sand underneath.

We dug  a bit deeper.

We laid the layers of soil and sand on a sheet of plastic.

The sand seemed to go on far down into the hole.

There were grass roots in the top layer. There were small worms amongst the roots.

We found a giant earthworm deep in the sand layer.

We looked through the soils and sand to see if there were any creatures or even treasure.

Here is the profile of the top layer. See the grass roots.

See the sand starting to show through the topsoil.

We couldn't really dig much deeper with our spade.
We would need to dig a much wider hole to go deeper.

Here is the fat earthworm that was deep in the sand.

We found a grassgrub beetle in the top layer.

We found an old rusty nail. It looked like a worm at first.

The sand was wonderfully smooth and easy to make into shapes.

Fially we put the layers of sand and earth back in the hole and compressed it with our feet.

There was a bit of sand and soil left over after we filled in the hole so we carried it over to a depression on another part of Putikitiki.

We dug a second hole on the other side of Putikitiki beside the big fallen log.
Interestingly, the topsoil went a lot deeper.

We found broken glass and stones in that hole.