Making my first skirt

On Friday we got some old jeans for free and Mum had an idea of making a denim skirt from them.

I had to cut along the seams so that we had strips to use. Mum helped me design the skirt but I did the sewing myself.

There was quite a bit of fraying to do.

I was so excited to get it done so quickly.

There was enough denim for Mum to make skirts for Ruth and Hannah too. It's fun to have matching clothes. :-)

x 6

I've been learning to skip count in six and I was having a bit of trouble so I worked with the blocks and made the numbers.
I made it in a two rows so that the pattern was easy to see.
6,12,18,24,30
36,42,48,54,60
Once you get to 30 you just start over again but adding 30.
I redid the blocks so that I only used 2, 6 and 10 blocks. This helps me to see the 6+2=8 (on 6x3=18 because 6x2=12 is very easy for me). And when you look at 6x4=24, it's just double 6x2=12.

I then learnt the 6 times table. There is an easy way to times the even numbers. You half the number for the ten and then use the number for the unit. Mum wrote it on the board for me and wrote Even = Easy and it sure is. She says this has even helped her to learn her 6 times table because she never knew it.

This is also how I find the 5 times table easy for even numbers. All you do is half the number and add a zero.

5x8=40 (because 10x8=80 but 5 is half of 10 so you just half the answer).

Swiss Family Robinson

by Johann Wyss

A family gets stranded on an island. They get all the useful things off the ship and then they blow it up so that they can get all the wood. They found a big tree and make a house in its branches and a staircase going round inside the trunk (it was called Falconhurst). They also found a salt cave and made that into another house. Falconhurst was a summer home and the salt cave a winter one.

There were four boys. Fritz, Ernest, Jack and Franz. They had lots of animals, they even had an ostrich and buffalo. They even got to ride on them. Once they had a race and suddenly the mum and dad heard hooves and Franz came riding on his buffalo.

When the boys were older, Fritz went exploring on his own. When he got back he told them he wanted to show them something. So they follow him to a smaller island and he introduced them to a girl called Jenny. She stayed with them until one day a ship came. They were looking for Jenny to take her home. Fritz and Franz went with her. Fritz and Jenny got engaged. The rest of the family stayed on the island. They had named it New Switzerland.

Beta finished

Today I finished Beta. It only took me 6 weeks to do the whole year's work. I got "The Last Battle" - the last Narnia cd for finishing the work. I was so excited about being close to finished that I did 9 tests today (and two of them were really long ones).
I am excited to start on Gamma but know that it will be harder because my multiplication is not quick. Alpha helped my addition and subtraction to get really quick and so I am sure Gamma will help me a lot.

Julie of the wolves

Miyax was lost in the Arctic. Thankfully her father had taught her some things. She finds a pack of wolves and manages to communicate with them. She pats the leader (his name is Amaroq) underneath his chin to show respect. She pats the pups and weakest wolf on top of their nose to show that they must show respect to her. When Miyax was young her father went out in a boat and never came back, so people thought he was dead. She said Amaroq was her adopted father. He brought food to her, he scared a bear away from her to protect her he even brought her to the wolf den to sleep. The leader pup, Kapu, would come and play with her. Once he came when she had finished cooking meat and she gave him some. He liked it so much that when he could catch something he brought it to her to cook. A while later he came back for some cooked meat.

She was running away to her pen pal. As she was getting close to the end of her journey an aeroplane came over and started to shoot at the wolves. They hit Amaroq and he died. They just wanted to get one of the ears for money. Afterwards Kapu became the leader. After a while Miyax finds her father. She was so happy that he was alive. But when she went into his house she saw a whole lot of American things and that he had married an American woman. Miyax did not want to go to her pen pal anymore because she was American and it was Americans that killed her adopted father. So when she saw the American things in her father’s house she left.
As she was going to the house she had made, her pet bird died. Then she realised that she could not survive alone. So Julie pointed her boots towards her father and happily went to him. She had been calling herself Miyax because she wanted so much to be an Eskimo and that was her Eskimo name.

Silly Story

This morning I had to write at the top of the black board. I could not reach so I got on a gym ball. I was all right till a had to get down. Then I took the "easiest" way - I fell. We went to the doctor and she said my wrist might be broken because it hurt so much. So we went to town for an x-ray. The lady that took the x-ray was very nice and gave me a copy of the ex-ray (normally they don't pint them out - they just look at them on the computer). My wrist was not broken - just strained. I had to use "RICE" which stands for "Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation".

Promise

We had a promise ceremony for some of the girls today.

As a sixer







I took up the girl in my six who was saying her promise.

Mum also made her promise today.

Mum got some lovely flowers.