For the last two weeks the rest of the class and me have been learning all about plastic in our oceans. Did you know that 51 trillion microplastics and 25 trillion macroplastics are in our oceans, and every year at least 14 million more tons of plastic is dumped into our beautiful ocean. We have been made aware of the great danger the ocean is in, so we each made a DLO (digital learning object) to help convince people to stop trashing the ocean.

We also had to answer questions about plastic. Here they are:

Define these words:

Garbage:
rubbish or waste, especially domestic refuse.

Reduce:
make smaller or less in amount, degree, or size

Recycling:
make smaller or less in amount, degree, or size.

Sustainable:
avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle are the 3 Rs.
Recently I saw a poster with 5 Rs- what might the other 2 be?
Rethink, Repurpose.

Why is having lots of plastic rubbish bad?                                                                                                                                      Having lots of plastic rubbish is bad because it takes centuries to break down and animals have been known to eat it.

What can happen if the plastic doesn’t make it to the landfill?                                                                                                          If the plastic doesn’t make it to the landfill plastic can end up in oceans, rivers, lakes and forests. Every minute a garbage truck full of rubbish is dumped into the ocean.

Have a look inside your lunchbox.
What items contain plastic?
Is some of this plastic reusable, or is it single use?                                                                                                                          Can you think of a way to swap out some of the plastic?

1 thing in my lunchbox is not reusable (it is also the only thing that has plastic), it is the packet for my bar, in the future I could have homemade bars so I won’t have to throw away this plastic.

Thanks for reading,

Heath 🙂

This term me and the rest of the class have been working on making books with just Māori writing, each book contains at least pages. We can make as many as we can and the topic for the books is any simple maori sentence with an equally simple answer. They use a repetitive question which is usually the title. So far I have made 2 books.

One is: He aha noho ai i te tino rīre?/What lives in the very deep water? In this book I have a silhouette of the creature with the question, and on the next slide reveal the creature. At the end there is an activity where you can match the name with the creature.

The other is: E haere ana ngā manu ki hea?/Where are the birds going? In this book there is no silhouette of a bird or name matcher, but instead at the end I show where each bird is headed. (which is always their home, and for migratory birds, where they are heading next.) All these birds can be found in New Zealand.

Cheers, and thanks for reading!

Heath 🙂

This morning me and the class watched a video about Kaikoura and how they were being sustainable. It said that after the earthquake Kaikoura put a rahui/ban in place to stop people from gathering kaimoana from certain parts of Kaikoura. This was because some of the seabeds rose by up to 6m and multi generation paua beds.

The people in Kaikoura saw that their ocean animal population had become much smaller, so some people formed a group called Te Korowai and asked for a ban to be put in harvesting marine life. After watching the video we were asked to fill in a sheet with questions about the video here is my sheet:

Being A Kaitiaki In Kaikoura

Complete the sentence: “Where the mountains meet the sea.

Te Korowai are known for their?
Marine strategy and making the rahui.

Sustainability means
Using something, but making sure it never runs out of that resource.

What kind of damage did the earthquake in Kaikoura cause?
It lifted the seabed by 6m in some places and destroyed paua beds.

What is a rahui?
A rahui is something that stops people from doing stuff to something tapu (like a ban).

Why is it important for this to be happening in Kaikoura right now?
Because they were running out of kaimoana.

How do they define ‘Kaitiakitanga’?
Protecting something for future generations.

How long will the rahui last and what will be the benefits?
It will last for under 7 years. The benefits are that the kaimoana in kaikoura will be able to bounce back against commercial fishing and survive for future generations.

What does ‘to harvest’ mean?
To gather kaimoana.

Recently me and Daimhin helped Whaea Mezza create some Black Boy peach jam. First, we soaked the peaches in boiling water. After a while, we placed them in cold water to help them soften. Next, we removed them from the water and skinned the peaches by digging in our nails at the top of the peach and carefully peeling downward and slightly to the right. Then, we put the peaches into a bowl with a little hot water before removing the pips by cutting them in half. Lastly, we got a soup spoon and poured the jam into some jars (10 peaches = 1 jam jar) the peaches were very soft and quite sloppy. It was very fun, and I hope I can make some more jam!

Thanks for reading and leave a comment below

Cheers, Heath : )

This year my school’s subject is kaitiakitanga, kaitiakitanga means guardianship, caring and protection. I think kaitiakitanga means caring for the planet, helping each other, and doing the right thing. We can show kaitiakitanga by caring for other people, animals, and the environment (e.g. doing a beach cleanup). I have been showing kaitiakitanga lately by: helping other people with their work, doing beach cleanups, pulling weeds, and being mindful of others and their property.

I have recently been working on some slides about kaitiakitanga, it covers: what the word means, synonyms for the word, how I am a kaitiaki at home, how I am a kaitiaki in class, how I am a kaitiaki in the school grounds, why is being a kaitiaki important, a word cloud about it, and how ocean pollution is bad for our environment and how we can fix it.

Here is a link to my mahi: Link

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on my poster showing how to look, create and care for an ant farm. I have an ant farm at home that I have looked after for a good couple of years so it was the coolest ‘how to’ I could think of. I had a really fun time making it but, before it could make it I had to first learn about how to write it.

I learnt that for the steps you could use: 1. 2. 3. etc. Or you could use time connectives (e.g firstly, next, lastly). I also learnt you need to use imperative verbs. Verbs are action words such as: running, dancing, flying. Imperative verbs are bossy verbs such as: run, dance, fly (They sound like someone is bossing you about). I also could use adverbs, adverbs describe a verb such as: carefully, slowly, sheepishly. The imperative verbs I used are: create, look, place, cover, seal, open, drop, close, remove, feed, give, watch, enjoy, multiply, get, hid and mix. The adverb I used is: carefully, as when dealing with small creatures I would advise you do this multiple times ( if not constantly) throughout the process. The time connectives I used are: first, next, after that, then and lastly.

Here is my ‘how to’ below –

This afternoon I did maths, I learnt about geometry. First I was put into at team with my friends from school and we were given a small pile of shapes on pieces of paper, we had so sort then into different groups based on their properties. I found it rather easy for me but it was still fun. Did you know that a heptagon (7-sided polygon) has 7 lines of symmetry, I have never checked a shape and discovered it has an odd number of lines of symmetry other than one!

Over the past week I have been working on my speech about saving the planet, it has been really interesting and I really enjoyed it. Here is my speech:

Introduction

He aha te mea nui o te ao, he taiao, he taiao, he taiao. What is the greatest thing in the world, the environment, the environment, the environment. The environment supports a vast range of species and ecosystems all over the world tangled up in circles of life, but the sad thing is this is starting to disappear because of things like deforestation, and many species are becoming endangered.

Rainforests

Rainforests are beautiful places full of new plants, animals and leafy canopies ripe for exploration, but they are becoming more scarce due to illegal gold mining, illegal logging and farming. Mining hurts the rainforest by making it harder for water to drain, leaving mercury in the water which goes into fish, in one area of the Amazon 90% of the fish tribespeople caught were contaminated by mercury. Logging is hurting the rainforest by cutting down trees, did you know that if you cut down one large tree in the rainforest you could pull down several other trees because they are connected by roots and vines. Farming hurts the rainforest because farmers clear an area for their herd but soon the grass can’t grow and the farmers have to cut down more rainforest.

Oceans

The oceans of this world are full of majestic sea life and wonder, but it won’t be this way forever, because of things like pollution, overfishing and oil spills. Pollution damages our oceans because sea life might eat the rubbish and choke. Overfishing is dangerous to our oceans because bottom trawl fishing rips up the coral so the creatures that rely on the coral cannot survive, so they either move on or die, overfishing also means there might not be enough of a species of fish and they start to die out. Oil spills are deadly to all kinds of sea creatures. It hurts birds by making their feathers not repel water anymore and the creatures that have fur, their fur doesn keep them warm anymore. As for the fish, it gives them all kinds of problems from fin erosion to enlarged livers.

Extinction/Conclusion

There are many reasons why a species may become extinct such as taking away the species habitat (665 species extinct), overfishing/overhunting (366 species extinct), global warming (882 species extinct) and lots of other reasons. But the main reason species are dying out is because of climate change, and what is causing all this climate change? Humans. We are doing this and it is only going to get worse unless we fix it, so I think we should all try a little harder to save the planet, thank you.