Flax Art!

This week is the Matariki week for our class/school. Matariki is a star cluster. The maori people use it as a sign for their new year. People say that if you can see the matariki stars clearly it's going to be a good year. To celebrate we have decided to make Harakeke, which is the Maori name for flax, mats and baskets, and on  Friday we are going to have a free sausage sizzle and put them on either our Harakeke mat or basket. We used the weaving technique to do so for both. The Harakeke basket is a bit more complicated in my opinion but thats just me and I ended up messing up a lot and I made mine the wrong way but it still looks ok! 

                                                    

It curled up and got worse through the night and doesn't look too good from the front but it's still pretty good but I didn't finish my mat. I got a bit of help from my friend Cooper. I'm happy that I've now learnt how to weave and make both a mat and basketout of Harakeke. Have you ever tried weaving? And if you have, did you like doing it and would you do it again? Thank you for taking your time to read my blog!

Emilly Carr Art

This term Mrs Swinburn (our art teacher) told us that we would be doing art on Emily Carr. Emily Carr was a very famous canadian artist back in the 1900s and sadly passed away on the second of March 1945. The art we are doing is based off the trees she used to paint. First we did a practice and they turned out really well. For our practice we spread newspaper over the desks, put a few blank peices of paper down and started painting. I painted the trunk first and then the leaves. It took a bit of time till I finished but it still look's really cool. Here was my finished product. 

I think it looks better from afar but I still really like it. Then we made a plan for our other tree. We picked 2-3 colours, picked a sponge and then started making our backgrounds. I did orange, yellow and bright red. Soon after we started our tree. At first I was starting to think it looked bad but the more I did the more I liked it. Finally I was done. Heres my finished product, it's not as good as I expected but still super cool! 

                                                

We added our Initails and we were finished! Have you ever done art inspired by Emily or a different artist? And how do you think I could've made it better?

Is It Real? ^_^

This week we have been learning about how to tell if a website is true or fake. Our main topic was the tree octopus! The tree octopus is a hoax.(A hoax is a made up thing to trick people and stuff like that) Lots of people have made websites about the Tree Octopus, some saying that it is a hoax, but a bunch of people don't say that. anyways, first off, octopi cannot breath out of water. SECOND! There isn't such thing as the word, "octopuses". It is actually called, "octopi". THIRD! if a website has a bunch of spelling mistakes or missing punctuation, it may not be true. Fourth is that most true websites have an email, some information about them or how to contact them and stuff like that. There's a lot more but that's just pretty boring stuff, we read a few articles, a story and made a poster. 

Here's mine so far!

The next thing I did was a fake animal. 

Here it is!

His name is Jeffery. He's "ToAtAlLy ReAl". The way I made him was I got up a blank google draw and searched up Cat, Bird and Giraffe by pressing, CTRL, SHIFT, ALT and I all at the same time. Then I took a screenshot of the pictures I wanted and went onto Remove.BG and got as much of the animal as I needed. for the Giraffe I didn't need to use Remove.BG because I searched up Giraffe png and then double clicked on the picture and cropped it to the right part. There are a few other tasks I need to do but they are pretty boring so I didn't include them. Thank you for using your time to read my blog post. What do YOU think I could've done to make my animal and poster better?

Rocket Challenge!

Last year we started doing rocket challenges with plastic bottles. A bunch of schools around the world has been competing in this, but last year I wasn't in Kereru, so I couldn't participate. But this year we are doing it again! Now that I am in Kereru I can participate. On Wednesday we launched a rocket belonging to Lincoln. When Lincoln shot his rocket off it shot straight up, It was spinning in a really cool way as well, It went so high I thought if it was a bit bigger it might not have came down for at least 5 minutes but I'm not sure. Here Is the video of Lincolns rocket, just so you know It might be a bit hard to see the actual rocket but It's still cool,

I actually helped Lincoln put the sand in the bottle and while I was helping I was kinda thinking that since it had sand in it it would be too heavy but instead it was just right! After we shot Lincolns rocket we shot it again, but the rocket broke a bit and it had a burn on the end. I have and Idea on how I'm gonna do mine and if it goes how I wan't it to be I'm going to be very happy. I found out that extending your bottle and putting just enough sand to fill at least 3 quarters of the bottle makes it go better, I think I might mix a tiny bit of water in the extended part of my bottle so that it mixes in with the sand. What kind of things should I do to my rocket so that it goes better?