Creation time

This term Room 8 have been investigating mechanisms and how they relate to toys.  Early in the term we blogged about going to MOTAT and you can you read this here.

As a follow up from this we designed then created our own toys.  For this we came up with some class success criteria using our trip experience and what we already know, being kids who play with toys.
Our success criteria was:

• the toy needed a mechanism
• it needed to be fun
• it had to be something we could create
• it also had to be safe

We entered the design phase, using our art and visual language books to draw and label all the materials that we thought we would need.  Then we had a couple of sessions in class creating.  Through this time we used lots of different skills, creation, collaboration, resilience because our things didn't always work.

Below you can see the toys we created:



Following this, we had an open day with the rest of our syndicate where we invited the rest of the school in to come and learn about our toys, and most importantly have a play.  Finally, we used this information to compare and contrast our toys we have created with ones that we have at home.  It was a really valuable learning experience for all of us.  We would love some positive, thoughtful and helpful comments about this. Please leave us some ideas below.

Global connections - why are we here?

Today with James (our cybersmart teacher), we continued our work with google maps.  Below you will see an embedded map that shows where each of the students (and teachers) in our senior syndicate were born.  This was our starting point for some discussion questions and some of the tools in Google Maps.




You will find the discussion questions here on our class cybersmart page.  We then discussed our thoughts and feelings about these on our individual blogs (see the sidebar for more).

Following this James really challenged our thinking with the following video.
The Lie from Untitled Productions on Vimeo.

We watched, we absorbed, then we posted our thoughts about this.  Be sure to check these on our individual blogs.  We would love it if you posted a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment below.  How does this make you feel?  Is your class or workplace similar to our classroom?

Google map - connections

Today James introduced us to Google Maps as part of our cybersmart learning. We collaborated to create a shared doc that showed all the different places that we were born. As a class we are originally from some amazing places and it is pretty special that we have all come together as Room 8. Below you will see the map of the different places we are from. While creating this map it was really important for us to apply our cybersmart learning so that we did not share too much information. Next time we meet we will further explore our connections in cybersmart. We would love it if you could take the time to comment on our learning. You may even have a connection with some of the wonderful learners from Room 8.

Toytastic times at MOTAT!

We have hit Term Four with our feet running!  On Tuesday (only the second day back), we joined the other two classes in our syndicate for a trip to MOTAT.  MOTAT is the museum of transport and technology.  We spent the day immersed in a range of different exhibitions, from the stunning inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci from ages ago, to the awesome 3D printed creations going on in front of our eyes. Above you will see a group of us experiencing school like it used to be!

Our visit was also really relevant to our inquiry into toys this term.  Each group was lucky enough to spend an hour with our special educators Melissa and John who guided us through a range of different toys.  It was hands on and we got to play with a variety of toys from different times.  This creative environment helped us come up with even more ideas for the toys that we will be creating later on.  If you are interested in finding out more from our own personal perspectives be sure to check out our individual blogs.  Soon our personal recounts will be appearing there!

Please feel free to leave a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment and/or question, we love the feedback and we would love to hear if you have had similar MOTAT experiences.

Week 8 - Chinese Language Week

Ni Hao,

As well as our usual learning we have acknowledged Chinese language week this week.  We have had a go at some different greetings and words that we could use each day.  There are six posters that have words we can used and you will see these displayed below with our Chinese Lanterns.

For reading, we followed a procedural text to create these Chinese Lantern with Miss McGrath.  You can find the instructions here if you would like to have a go at these too.

Week 7 - Tongan Language Week

Malo e lelei,

Week 7 was Tongan Language week and we celebrated this in a number of ways at school.  As part of our oral language work we got together in buddies and had a go at using some of the following phrases.

Ko hai ho Hingoa? What is your name?

Ko hoku hingoa ko...  My name is...

Fefe hake? How are you?

E meiaki au.. I am fine, thank you...

We also developed some tapa cloth designs to hang in our class using symbols, patterns and some aspects of Math and symmetry.

Finally, we had a small celebration on Friday afternoon before lunch where some boys from the senior syndicate joined in with dance and also shared a special song with us.  It was great to see the teachers dressed by some of our Tongan Mums on this day too.

Monday Maths Madness

Our week started with a mathematical bang!  We spent our morning block immersed in a range of different math problems.  We split into groups across the senior syndicate and got our brains into gear while we tried to solve a variety of different problems.  Best of all we had loads of equipment to use to investigate and work out these problems.  Here are a few of the action shots from the day.

Graphic scores and musical storytelling

This afternoon Room 8 were very lucky to have Miss McGrath in to help with music.  The focus of the lesson was on sequencing and retelling a common story.  In small groups students designed a graphic score to help represent the sounds that they created with music.  This is shown below in the photo.

With the help of a conductor they then retold the story.  You can watch it in the video below.  Be sure to leave us some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback.

Ako Hiko - student led toolkits

The second annual Ako Hiko student led toolkits were held today at Hay Park School.  12 eager students from our Year 5/6 syndicate joined representatives from the other 7 Ako Hiko schools for a day of fun, learning and collaboration.

Students had the chance to sign up to three different sessions last week to experience some of the amazing skills, hits, tips and tricks other students were willing to share. From Tinker-Cad to Makey-makeys to coding to storybird to google drawings there was something for everyone! Our students thoroughly enjoyed their new learning as well as connecting with other students in the cluster.
Ricky and Lily from Room 8 presented "Code studio in the class Room" in the first round of toolkits, then Safa from Room 8 and Izzy from Room 9 shared "Creating shared books and yearbooks using google drawings". The third and final session was a chance for all 12 participants to enjoy some more learning.  We had an amazing day and had the chance to learn lots of new things and about ourselves as well.  Thank you to Hay Park School, Mrs Archer and everybody else involved in the organisation of this day!

Sharing our Sharing

Week Four was an exciting and extremely busy week for Room 8!

 On Monday we had our normal cybersmart session with James, then joined up with the senior syndicate for the different aspects of production rehearsal in the afternoon.  Tuesday saw a selection of us out representing Waikowhai at tackle and ripper rugby.  On Wednesday we rotated our way around the hall in Gymnastics.  Some Year 6's investigated the Waikowhai Intermediate Day while some Year 5s helped out with the Spark Volunteer day by pitching in to beautify our school.  Finally on Friday we had students participate in our local community panel.

On top of these activities we managed to compile and share our learning at our assembly on Friday.  You will see the wonderful things we have working on embedded in our Google slide. Check out what we have been doing and please leave us a comment if you want to find out about anything we have shared or any of the activities above.  We love your feedback!

What is a quality blog comment?

Room 8 were extremely excited to see James again for our regular cybersmart session.  Today we were working on creating a quality blog comment within the Learn-Create-Share cycle.  This skill is extremely valuable as we continue to grow our online presence and digital footprints.

Our first task was to 'create' by contributing to the padlet embedded below.  James challenged us to describe all the things that we might see in a quality blog comment.

Created with Padlet

We then focused on "Learn". By reading examples of quality blog comments and viewing two relevant videos we were even more knowledge about commenting.  If you would like to find out more these resources are available on our cybersmart page in the first "smart relationships" section. With new knowledge on board we revisited and reflected upon our padlet contribution to make any changes. We say proudly that we had lots of great ideas in our first attempt and only had to make minor adjustments.

Then it was time to "Share", our favourite part.  We were challenged to use the quality blog post rubric to describe and share our learning. While we are getting better at sharing, the next learning step for many of us is to give more detail on our individual blogs so our audience can gain plenty of information, enough for them to leave us a quality comment. 

If you would like to find out more about Room 8's individual thoughts please check out our individual blogs.  We love positive, thoughtful and helpful comments and feedback and we are working hard to respond to you too!

Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu introduction, Round Two

This term we have joined a new Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu blog group. We are looking forward to using these blogs in our reading and writing programmes.  It means we will have a greater audience to share our learning and creations.   We are really working on positive, thoughtful and helpful comments and will use other class blogs to do this.

 You will find the links to our three buddy class blogs on the right hand side of our page in a blog list.

Below is a thinglink that has a small poster introducing each of the fabulous learners in Room 8. If you want to find out more about these awesome people, or connect with them, please check out their blogs at the side of the page too.  We love comments and feedback!

Experimenting with Electricity

Waikowhai Primary Senior Syndicate welcomed in the new term with an afternoon of fun and learning.  We have continued to focus on electricity within the context of integrity and spent the first afternoon of the term collaborating with others from different classes using the "Brain Box" circuit kits. We collaborated, concentrated, did some learning and created some circuits from the book as well as our own special creations.  We have taken and filed photos to create a DLO to then share out our learning using our individual blogs.  Please check these out to see what we have found out so far.

Week Eight - Confident Kids

This week we have started the Keeping Ourselves Safe (KOS) programme. We had a fantastic first session in which we discussed and completed activities around the key message "Confident kids make safe decisions". Parents, we are bringing some home learning sheets home to discuss these confident decisions with you.  We acknowledge that to make a safe decision, and help others out we need to confidently describe our feelings. Below you will see our class generated padlet that describes the feelings we know.  Lots of thought went into this, please leave us a comment if you feel there are any other important feelings we missed out.

Created with Padlet

Week Seven - Blogging and Photography

This week we have launched our individual learning blogs.  You will see links out to all of these on our class page in the reading blog list.  We look forward to keeping you up to date with our learning journeys.  As we develop our skills we are going to post together and grow our confidence, sharing the learning and creating we have been working on. This week we used the tool screencastify to create a video tour for our blogs. Be sure to check them out.

Our Art exhibition show is coming up in Term Three. This week we started creating 'joiners' inspired by the artist David Hockney. Joiners are created by taking lots of photos of an object, then combining the photos together to recreate the picture. We have started with a chair from our class before we search for inspiration for our individual pieces.  To create this Mr Riceman gave us a photo of a chair divided into 16 pieces. In groups, we took photos of each of the squares then uploaded them to our google drives or emailed them to ourselves and group. We then used a google drawing to cut copy paste and re-assemble these. Here are some of our first attempts.

Week Six - Assembly Week

This week was Room 8's assembly. A big thank you to Miss McGrath who helped us out this Friday.  It was great that we had the chance to share some of the things that we have been blogging about as well as presenting to a big audience and getting feedback that way too. The Gurnard reading group enjoyed presenting their play and had a chance to showcase some of the skills for our upcoming production.  Watch this space as rehearsals will be starting very soon. A big congratulations to all of the students who got a special camp award for the different skills we worked on while away.

Week Five - Wastewise and Finished Products

Did you know that over half of the waste that is created by Auckland could in fact be recycled? Neither did we until Wednesday. On Wednesday afternoon, our Wastewise Facilitator Ron took us through a fantastic workshop. He helped us classify and sort different types of rubbish (Ron called it stuff) that we create into either landfill, recyclables or compost. We had a quick competition with Room 9 and they managed to come out as the winners but we still got lots of good ideas. Our next step is to play the sorting game every day and make use of the different types of bins we have at school, as well as sharing this message with our friends and families.

After the whirlwind that was camp we have also managed to finish off some of the bullyfree resources that we were working on during Week 3. Below are a couple of examples of wordclouds that we created using tagul.

We were also learning about how to copy and paste codes so that we can embed our thinglink creations about ourselves in our upcoming individual learning blogs, very exciting!  One of the things we talked about in bullying free week was getting to know each other.  Knowing more about each other helps us to get along.  We have shared some things about ourselves in our thinglinks, while remembering to stay cybersmart and not sharing too much.  Here are a couple of our creations.

Week Four - Camp

This week, Room 8, along with the senior syndicate braved the weather to travel to Houghton's Bush Camp in Muriwai.

For four days we were extremely busy walking through bush, viewing waterfalls, building and testing bivouacs in the elements, challenging ourselves on the confidence course,  reading and following maps for orienteering, enjoying the rugged west cost beaches, braving the dark on a Burma trail, sharing our talents and the camp concert and more. 

We returned yesterday afternoon, tired but happy and Friday has been a somewhat quiet day on reflecting on how we have shown resilience, respect and above all Integrity. 
We want to say a massive thank you to everybody who was involved, the parents who helped and the staff for looking after us.

Week Three - Bullyfree Week

This week at Waikowhai we are embracing the first ever Bullying free New Zealand Week.  So far we have looked at a variety of activities to further develop our awareness and become even better citizens.  We have drafted posters for our pink t-shirts, brainstormed key adjectives to describe our class and presented these on paddles for a waka that we will display.  Today we had fun with thinglink, describing ourselves so that people know us better and may be less inclined to bully us.  We have also collaborated to generate lots of ways to help others on a padlet (see below).  We are in the process of creating helping hands wordclouds using our magnificent ideas.  Check back later in the week for more sharing of the learning and creating activities.

Created with Padlet

Week Two - Wild Wacky Wheels and more

What an exciting second week we have had.

 As a class we are making strong strides towards being ready for our individual blogs. On Monday we had a go at creating infographics with the support of James and on Tuesday Mrs Archer from Hay Park School came to help us build up our blog commenting skills. The main theme of these visits was what to share and how we can be positive, thoughtful and helpful. This coming week we will try these skills out as we investigate the other blogs in our Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu group.

 Camp is also fast approaching, just over a week to go. Friday was our wild, wacky, wheels day fundraiser. Great fun was had by all as you can see from these photos. We had great fun taking part and we want to make a special thank you to Ms Sands and the leadership team for the smooth way they ran the day!