He Puna Pūmanawa

Mrs Chatterton signed up He puna Pūmanawa in The School Writing kit this year, to exchange postcards with a different school. There were a variety of writing activities that we completed before we wrote on the postcards. We discussed the naughty things we did as little kids and wrote a poem following 'This is just to say' template. Torbay school shared a couple of their poems to us.  We also used Google maps and planned a journey from Torbay's classroom to He puna Pūmanawa. We transferred the information on a class map where we all contributed place names and street names. On this map, we shared what we thought was the best thing to eat at our favourite restaurant and how to find us.  Each of us had to write about a time we went on a journey. Something we saw, something we remember, a person who was with us, a wonderful imagined thing that didn't actually happen and the reason for our journey. Every sentence had to have only 6 words. It was tricky but we all managed it!...

He puna Pūmanawa spent some time to understand how we see the moon at night. A globe, ball and light was used to show us. We sat in the darkest corner of the room. Mrs Chatterton shone the light on the right hand side of the globe, we then saw that the side of the globe was lit up (day) and the other side is in darkness (night).  We could see when the earth is under the rays of the sun, it's day. The part of the earth that's in the light spins around until it's on the other side of the earth. However, there's no sunlight there, it's gone over to the dark side which is night time. Meanwhile, the section that was in the dark has also spun around, it's now under the rays of light which is daytime.  It was a great way to see how we get night and day!