What We Want To Achieve This Year

Kelly
I want to improve my guitar skills so that my band and I can perform with confidence and sound good, I have lessons every Thursday at school, so this should be achievable.

I also want to achieve well academically, do my best in all subjects and improve my strengths and weaknesses.

I would like to compete in the Nelson A&P Show with my dog in the dog handling category and come in one of the placing, he knows a few tricks, but I'd like to teach him more.

Careers day is next week and I am going to Halifax, a vet in Nelson, to hopefully gain some knowledge of what it is like to be a vet and learn some helpful tips on how to become a good one.



Emma
I would like to be able to play the drums so that when the band of four that we are more than amazing when we perform.

I would also like to be a bit of a mathematician so i want to achieve as much as i can in maths and learn as much math as possible and not get board of it.

Also one other thing I'd like to achieve is that i be, maybe not the fastest but one of the fastest people in the school so that at athletics so I can be useful for the school and know that I've done something for the school

Black, White Or In-Between?

For the last few weeks, the whole of Mapua school has been doing science experiments for the annual Nelson Science Fair. Here is our story:

We (Kelly, Eva and Emma) decided on doing our experiment on chocolate!!! We surfed the net looking for some ideas and found the one we wanted: Which cadbury chocolate flavour is the best to use when modeling chocolate?

Once we had our question, we started to think of how we would judge the chocolates and what method we would use. We came up with three categories for testing- Fastest to Melt, Fastest to Set and Best Looking.

We then decided that our method would be to put a small plastic bowl in a bigger plastic bowl fill of boiling water and time how long it takes the chocolate to melt. We then would put the melted chocolate into the chosen moulds, place it in the freezer and time how long it takes to set. And finally, we would judge the appearance of the finished chocolate by looking at the outside, and then cutting it in half and looking at the inside. We rated the appearance out of 15.

We found the averages of all the tests (we did 3 tests for each chocolate in each category)

and then figured out the overall winner. The winner was dark chocolate, so if you are ever modeling chocolate, then use dark because it is the best thing when it comes to the easiest and best looking chocolates!

Although we didn’t make it into the Nelson Science Fair, we had a great time working in our experiment, and we definitely enjoyed eating it!

Although we didn’t make it into the Nelson Science Fair, we had a great time working in our experiment, and we definitely enjoyed eating it!

Winter Tournament

This month we have been practicing extra hard for the upcoming sports events. We have three tournaments heading our way, the winter tournament, the 7 aside tournament and the Takaka sports exchange. The teachers offered us a chance to play any of the four sports (hockey, netball, soccer and rugby) and we then got into groups inside those categories and practiced really hard. The different sports have a mix of boys and girls, yr5-6 and it is great to see the newcomers giving everything a go!

By Kelly and Emma