Teacher comment

Wow Isabella what a great day of writing you had today! Jenni was really impressed with your blog post and I was amazed by the depth of your writing and the quality of the language you used in the afternoon writing workshop, This is obviously a real strength for you and I am looking forward to seeing what develops over the next few weeks! Keep up the great work.
Darryn

Out For A Walk

At Enrich, we did something a bit different. We went on a walk to boring-doring old Wachner Place. We got there, and it was even plainer than I remembered. Loads of concrete, a clock, Hell's Pizza, Subway, and that was about it. Oh, and there was a pretty grubby statue about Murihiku or something. So unentertaining I wanted to throw up! We had to walk around and take pictures of this fabulous scenery and decide how we could improve it. Loads of ideas were thrown around our group, which consisted of Clara, Robert, Miro, Finn, and Amy. Oh, and ME!
Ugh, there was nothing to dooo, the smell of Hell's Pizza and Subway was torturing me... not the best field trip of my life. It just looked so... so... something I can't say on this blog or I'd be in a sticky situation!
As you've probably inferred, Wachner Place was PU.

So what could we do? One of the many ideas was to put a giant chessboard and chess pieces in Wachner Place. We spent a while deciding where the best place to put this was and sketching it. We also took other pictures of very blank places, full of litter and grime and other gross things that you would crinkle your nose at. We decided to clean up a lot of places, and to put more colour in this lurrvely entertaining... thing.
We looked around for walls where we could paint murals. Painting a mural would also stop the graffiti. Speaking of graffiti, guess what our group saw? (And I'll bet ten cents that we weren't the only group). We saw a tiny, wide pillar that comes about up to an adult's waist. Loads of then around. One had that Murihiku statue perched on top, another had a drinking fountain on top of it, and one had SWEAR WORDS WRITTEN ALL OVER IT!!! And it said...

Eat ................!!!! Where the ....................... was, there is actually one of the worst swear words available, and some of you will know what it is... 
If you some ideas about what to do to Wachner Place, then write a comment telling me your ideas! It would be a tremendous help!

Murals

Today at Enrich... drone, drone, drone! I always start like that! At Enrich we did more on our new Concept Curriculum, Environments. We were put into groups of four. In my group was Destiny, Hannah, Cheanna... and me.

We were given a few sheets of pictures of things that are unique to Southland - like the water tower, Henry the Tuatara, etc, etc. And with those we had to create a mural - just a draft, sort of practicing for if we want to do a mural on one of those totally boring brick walls of Invercargill for our project for Environment. I don't think I'll do murals, but there are many other choices...

Painting with Katie May!!!

Today, we did THE coolest thing ever in the history of the entire milky way! OK, so we were given a choice out of maths tessellation's, chemistry and painting to do for this week and next week and I chose painting. Katie took us to the front whiteboard and we watched a few tutorials and clips about Claude Monet. The style of painting that we were doing was called Impressionism, which means that not every detail is perfect, and it's sort of blurry, but really colourful and interesting!
Claude Monet's most famous painting is one of a part of his garden, a beautiful bridge over a pond with lillypads. We copied this painting onto a small bit of paper. We used all the special techniques that the tutorial taught us with a flat brush, and were given different colours to use and mix together. It was actually quite hard to get that exact blurring but still an interesting look, but the cool thing about it was that you couldn't go wrong. If you did a malfunctioning experiment with one colour, then just blend it in with another colour! 

It was lots of fun and also a challenge. I wonder what we're going to do next week?... 

Tapa Cloths

Today I finished my Tapa Cloth, which is where you do designs such as shells or fish or flowers, on a piece of paper, then scrunch the paper up until it is soft and more like a cloth!
Then you dye it. No, no, you don't kill it, you paint dye on it. The other sort of dye.
ANYWAY I finished mine today. You had a choice of Kowhaiwhai panels, which are a type of traditional Maori art and Tapa cloths last week, and I chose the Tapa Cloth. Here is a picture of mine when it was finished.
Like it?
If you want to see a Kowhaiwhai panel, take a look at some other blogs including Hannah and Clara's. They might have theirs on display.

Chess with Tessa

Today I played chess with Tessa, and we used a chess clock.

You set the chess clock for five minutes on each side. There is a stop-and-start button. Press the start button. One side of the clock the seconds start ticking. Forty-nine... forty-eight... forty-seven...
There is a sort of flip button on the top. Once you have made your move, flip your side of the flip button. The other side starts ticking. Forty-nine... forty-eight... forty-seven...! 
Once a person's five minutes runs out, the other person has won!
I won, by a few minutes, but because I just move pawns real quick, not even thinking about it, so I usually end up with, like, two players left! But Tessa was better. She should have won. 

Wearable Arts Passion Time

Oh - my - gosh! The BEST thing just happened to me again. It was amazing. I did Wearable Arts for Passion Time today! I really wanted to, so I did. I worked with Destiny, Amy and Kady. We looked on Safari for dresses and ideas, and then sketched the one we liked, and then changed it ever so slightly. There is also a competition for fashion designing in Gore. They have one every year, and I'm doing it this year. 

Like I already said, it was awesome. I was totally engrossed in what we were doing. I searched my favourite colour dresses. Blue dresses, purple dresses, black dresses, gold dresses, sliver dresses. It was absolutely amazing. Amazing, awesome, cool, and fun! I am SO going to stay on Wearable Arts next week!