Visitors

=Stephanie Bowman A.K.A The Tuna Woman=

===On the 14th of March Stephanie Bowman an author from the United States who illustrates her own books visited our syndicate. After morning tea we came in and she was talking to our teacher when everybody was in here she talked to us about her plan to save the Long Finned Eel she told us about her book and talked us through it she had written her book about an old 101 year Long Finned Eel called Velvet living in Lake Rotoiti in the South Island. Velvet is sitting at the bottom of Lake Rotoiti ready to migrate downstream and eventually somewhere out near the Tongan trenches. The next night there is a heavy rain and Velvet begins her treacherous journey downstream and out to the trenches to hatch the eggs. She passes many dangers thinking that her babies aren't going to survive these dangers and get back. It was so different one hundred years ago. When Velvet gets out to the trenches she hatches her eggs and dies or as some people like to believe she will swim of and become a shark but that is just a myth. Anyway out of the 20-30 million eggs she hatches only the strongest and that is usually only two or three will survive. The rest of the story is about 70 glass eels drift along underwater currents most of the way back to New Zealand a few get eaten along the way so there are only 50 left when they are just about to get into New Zealand there bodies go through a big change to get used to fresh water. They enter the waters and just drift along for a few days and then encounter lots of dangers which only Elvis and three others survive then Elvis gets back to Lake Rotoiti. Stephanie is taking a big project all around New Zealand and sewing a huge tapestry of an Eel that she wants to eventually wrap around the Beehive which is the Parliament building in Wellington and that is about 50 meters in diameter. That is what we are taking part in.===

**Today April the 13th we sewed together our piece of the Eel Javier's mum who is a sewer came in to help us, our part of the Eel looks great it has our school name in the middle and lots of sea creatures around the outside. Me and my friend made a green sequined starfish it looks alright seeing as we have not done much sewing before.**

= = =Today the 7th of June a firefighter came into room 10 to talk to our syndicate about what the Fire Brigade does apart from putting out fires some of those things included Oil spills, Car crashes and trapped animals and people. It was also amazing about the amount of fire stations and volunteer fire fighters overall in all of New Zealand. It was also interesting to learn about how if you dial 11 instead of 111 it still calls the engines and a few minutes later a fire truck will turn up in your drive way and tell you why not call prank calls. Overall I learnt lots from the Fire Fighter and I hope his teaching will come in handy.= = =