Fairybread:
We made bird "Fairybread" with birdseed. Mrs Paterson made us kid " fairybread" We know which one we prefer to eat. We hope the birds like theirs. We hope that over the holidays the birds will find their special feeders and stay in our playground for us all to enjoy watching and listening to.

This is a mushroom birdfeeder. We made holes in the side of the tin for the seed to come out. We put a little dish of nectar ( sugar and water) for the birds that are nectar eaters.

This is a spider bird feeder. We put seed and birdseed fairy bread on it.

This is a house birdfeeder. We made holes in the bottom of the tin for the seed to come out. The birds can sit on the side and eat.

This is a robot birdfeeder. The birds can sit on the arms and peck the seed out through the holes in the bottle.

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We had a very busy day on Thursday designing our bird feeders. Mrs Paterson's daughter, Natalie, helped some groups use kidpix to draw pictures of birds for our "What am I ?" writing while we worked with Mrs Paterson in groups of 4 to create our birdfeeders. We recycled bottles and flower pots (Thanks to Josh and Hadley's Mums for donating these). We all worked hard drilling holes, cutting wire and screwing things together. We took turns at taking photos.

Thank you to all the parents who were able to join us on Friday for our Parents morning tea. We hope you enjoyed our singing and seeing our blog. Wasn't Room 1's play great.Room 3 did a great job of their undersea art (make sure you come in and see ours). Thank you to those who offered to help with PuMP. Remember there is a "Friends of the School" meeting in the staffroom this Tuesday 15 April at 7.30. We really appreciated your support.

Today we had a "Puppets Party". We made party hats for our puppets and on our party hats we put pictures of the puppets. We put them in the order that they came to the party in the story we have been reading. We used words like first, second, third, fourth.
We had 2 party tables with 9 children and puppets on each table. We had to cut up bananas, oranges, plums and muesli bars so that we all got the same amount.
We found out that if we cut 3 things into 6 pieces, we would have a piece each.There were 18 of us at the party and of course our puppets as well.(They didn't eat much though!)
3 lots of 6 makes 18 or 3 x 6 = 18

This is the email we sent to Mrs Paterson's nephew Robbie. He designed special feeding boxes for Kakapo. Asking questions of an expert is one of the ways we can research for our inquiry.He emailed back his answers today. We hope you find the answers to our questions, as interesting as we did.

Dear Robbie,
These are our questions about Kakapo. We hope you can answer some of them for us. Thank you for helping us with our research. We are going to make bird feeders so that birds come to our playground. Our school is helping to establish a new reserve near the river and we are going to find out what plants we should plant to get native birds back into town.

From
Room 2

What do you put in the feeding boxes? Emma
Well Emma, Kakapo normally eat the fruit and seeds that the trees drop so we try to feed them food with lots of energy like apple, kumara, almonds and macadamia nuts.

How and what do the kakapo drink. Micahla
Great question Micahla, they have a bowl on a post that has a lid to stop the other birds from getting in. they put their faceup to it and use their beak to open the door. Then they scoop a beak-full out and slurp it back.


Why did you feed the Kakapo? Jone
Because there are so few Kakapo (91) we try to make sure there is nothing to prevent them from laying eggs. We make sure that they have plenty of food so they when they do lay their eggs they can sit on them for as long as possible without getting up to eat. If they have eaten plenty of food, they don’t need to leave the nest.

How do kakapo get to their feeding boxes? Shannara
Kakapo are very intelligent birds Shannara and when they know an easy food spot, they keep going back to see if there is more. They have a great sense of smell too. Sort of like the treats in the cupboard at home, we can smell and remember where they are!

Where do kakapo hide? Lily
Usually they can be found under logs and in the forks in trees. They have an amazing smell (like musk perfume) and that’s what gives them away.

What do the feeding boxes look like? Joshua
Good question Josh. The boxes are held up off the ground so that the other birds can’t get in. There are two little bowls with lids that hold the food for the birds to eat from. There is also some scales for them to stand on that records how heavy they are.

How do they open the box? Amelia
The Kakapo put their face up to it and use their beak to open the door. Then they scoop a beak-full out and eat it up.


How do they eat the food? Daryan
Kakapo have a really strong (and sharp!) beak so they can bite through tree shoots out in the wild so the nuts and food we give them is no trouble for them to munch through. They use their big feet to hold on to the nuts while they eat just like we use our hands.

Why aren’t there very many Kakapo eggs? Hadley
Great question! Kakapo live for a very long time and they have only a few eggs each year. Often these eggs don’t hatch so they have to wait till the next year – this means that they don’t have many chicks each year.

How do the tags work? Jack
The tags are really similar to a cellphone. When you are trying to find the birds, you turn on a hand held tool that beeps more the closer you get to the kakapo.

How do they stop other animals getting into the boxes? Jessica M
The lids are locked until the right animal arrives at the hopper. When the right bird is on the scales, the lock releases and lets the Kakapo in.

How do you stop the animals killing the kakapo? Amelia
We have put all the Kakapo on islands that have no animals that could kill them. New Zealand has lots of small islands dotted around its coasts and if we remove the stoats, rats, possums and cats, the Kakapo can live happily

Do any other bird have feeding boxes like the kakapo? Ruby
Yes, we have made feeding boxes for some other birds Ruby. We have made one for Takahe and its pretty easy to make them for tui and bellbirds. These birds really like to eat sweet water so if you add a few spoons of sugar to warm water and stir it, you’ll have birds in no time!

Today we had Dance and Drama with Mrs Leov in the Opawa Room.

I liked when we did dancing with the fish under sea. Lily
We pretended we were under a net. Jasiah
We went under Mrs Leovs red net and black net which were just like real nets. Emma
I liked being under the nets as well. Ruby.
We pretended we were being crabs. Daryan
We liked being different kinds of fish. Amelia
I liked being a fish swimming around in the water. Fergus
I liked walking like a penguin. Jone
I liked doing star fishes. Hadley
We were read two stories about at the seaside. Josh
We had heaps of cool music. Jack
We had all different kinds of music. Jessica S

We are excited about what we will do next time. Thanks Mrs Leov.

Today our big buddies came and shared some bird books with us. They asked us lots of questions as they went. Then we used a programme called comic life to share all we had learnt. We chose which kind of page layout we liked and then we chose photos of our birds from the photo library. We dragged them into place until we were happy with how they looked. Then we told Mrs Paterson and Mrs van de Burg some things we knew about our bird and they added it to our pictures. We shared our work with the class with the data projector.

This morning we went to our school garden with Mrs Hepburn. She showed us tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, pumpkin, parsnip, red cabbage, lettuce and other salad greens and radishes. We got to taste some of it. Mrs Hepburn thought we were very clever because we knew lots about vegetables ,especially Jack. She might let us do some gardening this year.

Today we went to Room 1 to have Music with Mrs Robinson.

We listened to see what we could hear in the music. We could hear bumble bees, and trolls and swan music. Emma

We heard the trees make noise. The leaves were making making noises too. Daryan

I liked to step on the leaves and they were crunchy. Jone

We played a game. We had a ball. Someone goes into the cloakroom and when come back they have to find the ball. When they get close we had to clap louder. When they weren't close we clapped quietly. Shannara, Jack, Jessica M

We had to clap very loud and stamp our feet when they were there. Fergus

We were animals when the music was playing. Jasiah

The music was the carnival of the animals. Josh

Jack brought his dad's didgeridoo to school. He is very good at making music with it. It is really hard as you have to blow really hard and move your tongue.Some of our class have tried and they couldn't even make a sound.

This is the powerpoint we made with our photos after our Crunch and Munch show. We added our voices to the slideshow but they haven't come out on our blog.Oops! We can read the story to you.