One Cold Wet Night

One Cold, Wet Night

We had a blast reading, exploring and retelling One Cold, Wet Night 

by Joy Cowley and June Meisner.

One of our favourite characters in the story was a giant weta.  A weta is a large insect that is found in New Zeland that is related to the grasshopper.  Take a look...



Please take a moment and read through our own versions of "One cold wet night". We are sure you will enjoy them. Remember we love it when you comment on our work so please give it a go below.

How big is an ostrich egg?

Some of our children read a journal story about ostrich eggs and Mrs Walshaw was talking to them about how she had an ostrich egg at home. She brought it along for us to see and it was huge. Ostrich lay the biggest egg of any bird. We found out you could fit about 24 chicken eggs in 1 ostrich egg. That is a lot of scrambled eggs.

Thank you Mrs Walshaw for bring your eggstremely big egg to school. It was eggcellent.

Kiwi Feathers

Many thanks to Brynn for bringing in some real kiwi feathers for us to look at from Paparahia Station. They were so soft. We all loved looking at them and gently stroking them. Brynn told us that there use to be kiwi at Paparahia and two were taken away to the Kiwi House to breed. At least one was left behind with a tracker but that went flat along time ago and now they don't know where it is or if it is still alive. We wonder if there are still kiwi there and how we could find out?

Oh No! Pests at Mokau

We had another great visit from Kris from the Kiwi Trust and some of her friends. They weren't actually her friends though as they were pests. We did an activity where we were given clues and we had to figure out which pest was being described. 

We learnt that even cats and dogs can be a real problem with kiwi. We love Hamish our cat but we think we might have to put a bell on him so he can't sneak up on birds especially kiwi. We also decided that we want to find out what pests we have living around school and at home. Next term we are going to build some tracking tunnels to put around our school which we will monitor for footprints.

Did you know that Emmet and Reece made some neat tracking stations and we found mice prints in Reeces and Emmets peanut butter was eaten? What do you think we should do about our mice?

The kiwi that got away

We are currently looking at how we can help kiwi in our area and has part of this inquiry we travelled through to Tongaporutu on Thursday to see a wild kiwi having its transmitter battery changed. The weather was lovely but the kiwi decided it didn't want to come out of its burrow. Kris from the Taranaki Kiwi Trust and two of her colleagues spent the afternoon trying to persuade  it out but it was to clever and used its extensive burrow and tunnels to elude them. We did manage to check out a big dead rat that had been caught in one of the roadside traps which was interesting. It was pretty gross but we were happy that the trap was doing its job. We also got very good at Eye Spy and Claude was crowned the king after correctly identifying our objects numerous times. Many thanks to Gail and all our parent helpers and Maxine for the yummy lollipops. We are all looking forward to a future visit with the cheeky kiwi and will let you know how we get on.  

Cushion Star

Did you know that Cushion Star are the most commonly found sea star in New Zealand? They may be but not at Pioi!