Crash!!!

Have you ever seen a plane crash? I did. You film the room and then it will have a plane crash right in front of you. It is a special effects app. Lots of people like it and were playing with it all the way through morning tea.

I put beams across the river hoping it wouldn't break and... Crash!!! It split into three different pieces. Darryn was teaching us about some of the apps on the iPads. The first app was called Simple Physics. You have to build a structure that will not break even if it is used as a ramp for a boulder of a dam for a river. It is very hard but fun and challenging.

The final app was Pic Collage. You can cut out pictures and add text to it. I had a play around with a chicken. By holding down on one of the pictures of text, you can switch the placement from having the chicken on the top to at the back. Next week I'm going to play around with that a little more so that I get to know how to use it better. 

The caped man...

I always dreamed of being a super hero. That is the first line to the monologue that I'm doing in performance. Instead of singing today, Nicola grabbed some sheets of paper and told us what they were.

Nicola read them all out individually and once she had read all of them we had to pick one that we wanted to learn. Mine was about a boy who wanted to become a super hero, but didn't work out how he wanted it to.

I didn't realise that we had to have a costume too. Nicola's idea was to wear our underwear on the outside like in superman and batman, but Nicola went and looked in the box of clothes and found a cape.

Then we had to practice our words lots and lots of times. We went through our words about 10 times in 45 minutes. By week 6 we should know it really well.

Checkmate

The Pawn moved, then a Queen and a Bishop. Were you were able to work that out it was scholars? I didn't go to Luke's chess workshop, I played chess instead because I wanted to play chess to see if I could move up a little more on the leaderboard, but I didn't move at all. Then Luke did the workshop again  so I chose to go to it. 

He taught us about Scholars, opening moves and I asked about stalemate because I wasn't to sure how that works. I'm still not to sure, but it shouldn't matter too much. (I hope) 

There were two different kinds Scholars There's knight scholars and bishop scholars. I prefer the Bishop scholars. It's just because I can remember that better. I hope that I can stay at fifth on the leaderboard or higher.

Dunedin, here I come?

Finally! I won a game of chess. Today I played leaderboard chess against Jake. We both chose to use a chess clock. I quite like using a chess clock because I usually win. I'm not quite sure how but it just seems to happen.

I didn't think that I would beat him but as I actually used a strategy. Maybe that's how because I just move pieces most of the time and don't plan my moves.

Near the end of the first game Jake had one piece left and I had two and then his time ran out. It is not very often that I get someone into checkmate but it has happened. I win by their time running out usually. I think it was about the same ending on the second game.

Now that I've won,  I'm fifth on the leader board. I'm trying to stay in the top six so that I get to go to the chess tournament which is in Dunedin because it's our last chance to go while we're at primary school.

Performance With Nicola

Yah! We're back at Enrich for term 2. When we started our passion projects today I ran off to go to the back of the room to do performance with Nicola. 

First she gave us this little golden fluffy material and we had to pretend that it was something else. I used it as a T-shirt that was way too small for me. We were still playing the same game but Nicola gave us this pretty big green sheet. I used it as a sling for a broken arm. 

We had another warm up activity. You had to point at someone and say you and then we slowly got louder and LOUDER until we were yelling. Then it changed a little bit because we went from loud to quiet and after that it was quiet then loud and quiet again. It was really loud at some points.

Then we started to practice one of the songs that we had last week. We went through the song so many times it's stuck in my head now and it's kind of annoying too. 

We went and got a drink and then we came back and Nicola had put some new lyrics on our books. It was "Life on Mars" by David Bowie. That song is also stuck in my head. We listened to it once and then played it again and started singing along with it and then we just got better and better so now we already know the song quite well. So by week three we should know the new song very well.

Performance

Today we started singing with Nicola. Nicola gave us a couple of singing warm-ups. Then we had to freeze while she went and got the paper with the lyrics to the songs. We were going to be singing...  Taller, Stronger, Better by Guy Sebastian and Don't Stop Me Now by Queen. 

We listened to them about three times for each song and we all slowly started to sing along with it. While we were listening to the songs we were correcting the mistakes and writing anything that we think needed to be on there. They are both quite good songs. We glued in the songs into our books so that we all have a copy of the words. I wasn't too sure if I wanted to be in the performance group but now I know I definitely do want to be in that group. I can't wait until next term.

Performance group

Today for my passion project I started to do Performance with Nicola. Last year at school I was in the drama group so I thought it would be fun to do this. We played about 3 drama games before we did our auditions. Our first game was HASH. H is for happy, A for angry, S for sad and H for happy again. For 1-5 we had to say that number in a happy voice. If it was from 5-10 it was an angry voice. From 10-15 we had to say it in a sad voice and 15-20 in a happy voice again. We had about ten minutes to plan out what we were going to do. I decided to do some acting, but I forgot about the time limit. We had to makeup something from thirty to sixty seconds long. Mine was about ten seconds long but everybody else got in.