Friday, June 26, 2009

Dinosaur Exhibition

24th of June. Every term our school has a topic about something. At Pt England every time we have a new topic we go on a special trip. This term our new topic was about dinosaurs.

Our special trip was to the Auckland War Memorial Museum. We went to the museum in a bus. As usual the children were all crowded on the bus chit chatting, playing a game called "that's mine". I nearly fell asleep but luckily I had my friends to keep me awake!

Finally we arrived at our destination (-museum), it was pretty stuffy in the bus but as soon as I got out of the bus there was a nice breeze that cooled me off. Then we all got separated into our groups. My sister, a couple of other people and I were all in my big brother Havea's group. It was a while before we went in because we were not the only school.

I hadn't been in the museum in a while but when I walked in I suddenly remembered what it all looked like and it was pretty amusing! It was then time for us to split up and go on to the different sections of the museum that were about the age of the dinosaurs. Our first activity was searching for different types of animal species such as the penguins, underwater creatures , birds and even some native New Zealand species like the kiwi or the tuatara.

The activity took about 1/2 an hour and when it finished we could go out and have our morning tea. It was a funny thing though, as we walked out of our part of the museum there was a red carpet. My friends and I were pretending that we were celebrities in Hollywood strutting down the red carpet.


After our morning tea we went to our second activity which was with a man called Paul in a lab. In this lab we looked at a real live bone of a now extinct bird called the "Moa". Paul explained a lot of interesting theories and facts about now extinct animals-dinosaurs and Moas. He then gave us a lecture about extinction and how long the dinosaurs roamed the earth. We then got to have some fun (as if the whole trip wasn't fun.) The fun was searching through sand and excavating fossils out of stones.

We then had our final activity which was looking at dinosaurs and answering questions from the board where the facts and information were. It got really hot and stuffy again so I took my jumper off and it made no difference. But apart from that it was a great experience to be in the midst of the museum again. It was then time to go back to school.

I can't wait until term 3 brings a new topic!!

Monday, June 1, 2009

Queens Birthday

It is Monday the 1st of June and today is the Queen of England's birthday!!

On this special day all the schools in New Zealand have a day off school. I'm not really doing anything at home but typing this blog post up is keeping me busy by making my mind work just like it works at school.

An interesting little fact that I heard was that the Queen's birthday isn't actually her birthday, it's her dads! I'm not sure if this is true but if it is it's good to see that she is still remembering her dad and his birthday.

The Queen of England isn't only the Queen of England, she's also the Queen of New Zealand as well. I think that's partly the reason why we celebrate the birthday. I'm not sure of all the other countries that she's Queen of but I know that she is queen of a lot of places, (including us.)

I'd like to say to the Queen: "Happy Birthday!!" Even if isn't her birthday.