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.

Patterns Field Trip

Hoo-ray! Today all of us went on our first field trip for the year. We had to get into partners and my partner was Kavarn. We went because our concept curriculum for the year is 'Patterns'. We went not only to look at natural patterns, but man-made ones to, for example pillars to strengthen the buildings. I wasn't sure where we were going and then Darryn told us that the places were: the art gallery, the library, Queens Park and Countdown. We went to the library first. We looked around and then I saw a rack that had some bags on it so I took a photo and it was a pattern of order. That is the photo up the top. I really enjoyed the trip even though I was sort of tired.

Passion Project

                                              The one on top is the racing game and the one
                                              below is the four player ping pong game.

We were able to start our passion projects today. I'm making a video game on Scratch. It's going to be a two player racing game. I've made about four other games so I sort of know what I'm doing on Scratch. They were different kinds of ping pong games. My latest one was four player. The racing game that I started to make today is sort of difficult because I want it to a car around an oval track, but then it goes upside down, So I made little circles as the racers. I think it's going well but it's going to take quite a while before it's finished.

When I played chess today I was about to challenge someone and then Alex came up to me and wanted to verse me and we're not allowed to say no if they ask us unless we've already played today. We played for five minutes and then came in the chess clock. Most people hate them but I really like them because then I usually win and it continued today. Even though I was already above him on the chess leader board.

The horrendous hoop game

We ran outside excited because we were going to play a Wilson game and then... We found out that we were playing the difficult, HORRENDOUS, but fun Bullseye game. We were given two animals and two flat ones. What makes it so hard it that we have to throw them into four different hoops that are very Very VERY Far away.

Actually I'm just kidding, they are a decent distance away, they're not that far and by the way the animals are beanbags. If we got it in the hoop we would get a certain amount of points. They were two points for hoop one, four points for hoop two, six for hoop three, eight points for the fourth and last hoop. Darryn yelled go and we started to throw the beanbags. We got one in and another one and just after team one we got four in on the first round.

We went and collected them and then started round two. That round we only got three in the hoop. We were behind at least two of the other three teams then we started the third round and then all of a sudden we got twenty-two points and got the highest score out of all of the groups which was forty-eight Woo Hoo!