Book Review extravaganzas

Kia Ora Blogging World,

Term Four is upon us.  There is so much for us to fit into this last term of learning for the year.  For the first few weeks of this term, we have been working on book reviews.  Our teachers have helped us to choose a range of interesting novels which we have read and then reviewed.  Over the past couple of weeks, we have reviews parts of these on our individual blogs and uploaded the finished products. There is a link to the template on our reading page here.

Once we had our reviews finished we had the chance to create mixed groups to find out about how our classmates went and what they thought of their novels. We shared our successes, our work areas to work on and whether we would recommend this to our buddies. We shared the presentations digitally so our buddies could then give us positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback through comments. The tasks were challenging and helped us build a deeper understanding of our novel.

 Please check out the individual blogs linked on the side of the page to find out more of what our learners thought too.

Vector ePro8 challengers

Kia Ora blogging world,

It has been a really STEM focused week at Waikowhai for some of our senior students. As you would have seen from the previous post we had our science show in at school on Monday.  Then, on Friday, four senior students formed the "Waikowhai LIMOs" team (ask us where our name came from in the comments) and took part in the Vector ePro8 challenge at Mount Roskill on Friday for the first time.  The challenge involves engineering (the e), problem solving (the pro) and innovating to create a solution (the 8).

Our team in front of the impressive work station.

Eleven different teams participated in the challenge which ran for two and a half hours. It was heaps of fun and we managed to come third in our heat. This means we will be heading off to the semifinals later in the year where we will try to qualify for the grand finals.

One of our creations through the day

It was an awesome experience as we got to use lots of materials that we wouldn't normally have at school. If you would like to find out more you can check out the Vector ePro8 website.

Third place, bring on the semifinals!a

We would love some feedback. Please share positive, thoughtful and helpful comments in the box below.

The crazy, magical world of science.

When was the last time you found yourself entertained, enthralled, amazed and awestruck all in the space of an hour? For Waikowhai Primary School, that last time was just this morning.

The crazy, magical world of science show stopped into our school hall this morning for a show. What a fantastic way to start our week. During the show we were treated to magic tricks (which are often illusions involving more than just a bit of science), handmade fireworks, a mini-blowtorch, water powered rockets, levitating ping pong balls and more.


We were challenged to make predictions, to think about our observations and share and build on our knowledge in a fun way, while being entertained by the mad scientist. The highlight for me was seeing Abby blast a model earth into orbit using a super leaf blower.

When back in class, still buzzing and wondering more about the world we all decided to share our wonderings and learning in individual blog posts. Please click on the links at the side of the page to read more about what the students from Manukau took away from this show personally.


If you have been treated to this show before, please connect with us in the comments.  If you haven't and you are wondering more please ask us questions in the comment box.  Either way, we would love to hear from you.  We hope you enjoy the videos that show some of the things we enjoyed.

Blog you later.

Fledgling Bloggers - We love to share

This term we have a group of students new to Te Waka Ako (our classroom) and new to blogging.   We have been learning heaps of different cybersmart skills over a very short time.  Part of this has been our focus on sharing our learning. We have been working on putting together some of the things we have created.  Here are some of our first attempts at sharing.  We would love any feedback you can give us on the activities that are here.

Week 5 - Skip Camp

In Week 5 the Year 5 and 6 students from Waikowhai Primary travelled to Mount Ruapehu for our ski camp.  We were away from school from early Tuesday morning until late Friday evening and we had a fantastic time.

Our first day was mostly travel. This involved stops at Hamilton Gardens for a scavenger hunt, tin Otorohanga to investigate the Sir Edmund Hillary walkway, Taumarunui school for a stretch of our legs and afternoon tea, then we got to our accomodation.  It was freezing and after a delicious dinner we went for an evening walk.


Wednesday and Thursday were our days on the mountain.  The first day was full of challenges and extremely hot but we got there.  The second day we put our skills to use and improved heaps.


Friday was our trip back, we left early for a hot soak in Taupo, then a quick stop to view the powerful Huka falls before travelling back to Auckland via another Hamilton Garden stop.


To find out what we thought about our trip check out our individual blogs.  We have posted a camp booklet each that shares our reflections and the things that happened. There are some of these in the post.


We would to hear what you think about our camp experience too, maybe you could share some of the things that you have been on.

Week 4 - Student led toolkits

Kia Ora Blogging world,

In week 4 24 Waikowhai students had a fantastic experience. We joined other students from our cluster at the student led toolkits.  This was a fantastic day of learning, creating and sharing as well as building connections with other students across our cluster schools.

Five students presented their toolkits to full rooms of eager students. You can see their presentations below and may even learn something new, check them out.



We had two students in a coding challenge using the interesting sphero and a team of 4 working on building a structure in a problem solving challenge.  Check out the photos below.

The coding challenge

Problem solves in action.

The most creative construction.

If you would like to find out more please check out the individual blogs. Some of our students who went have posted their experiences and would love a comment.

Book Week Extravaganza - Week 3

What a busy book week we had last week! Once again our annual book week was a success.  Te Waka Ako went away from our usual programme to immerse ourselves in all things literacy.  It was a special week for us.

Judi Bilcliff (who runs the site rainbow poetry), a visiting author and drama teacher entertained us with a fabulous combined session on Thursday. Lots of us got up, involved and enjoyed listening to her share her hilarious poems with us.


Friday was our dress up day.  The theme was our favourite book character.  From the photos you will see what an awesome bunch we are with most of us getting really dressed up.  Congratulations to Lily from Manukau who was awarded one of the three dress up prizes for senior students in her Mad Hatter costume.


We also had our in class poetry recital competition on Wednesday and the finals on Thursday.  Lily, Amie, Sebastian and Oscar all represented Manukau in the Te Waka Ako (syndicate finals).  The standard of presentations was so high and the seven judges had real difficulty choosing the winners because the quality was so high.  Congratulations to Oscar who came 4th equal to receive a prize, an awesome effort!

Finally, we have created our own rhyming poems, remember to check out our individual blogs for published and illustrated versions of these poems over the next couple of days.  If you would like to find out any more about bookweek please drop us a comment or question below.  We would love to hear from you.

Waikowhai Intermediate Writing Buddies

Tena Koutou.

To end our exciting first week back we were lucky enough to have a visit from our Waikowhai Intermediate writing buddies.  Last term we started some online shared writing.  Our buddies at Waikowhai Intermediate gave us some feedback about our writing and since then we have also connected to write a shared piece together about a picture prompt.


It was very exciting to meet our buddies and put a face to the name and the person we had been communicating with online. It was especially great to connect with some of the students who were previous Waikowhai Primary Students.


Throughout the session we found out about the learning maps of our older colleagues and then we spent some time crafting a new piece of writing together.  At the end of our session some of the very brave students decided to share.


We look forward to working together to create stunning pieces of writing.  Keep an eye out on our individual blogs to read the things that we are creating and sharing together as we connect with other students in our community.

Please leave us some positive, thoughtful or helpful feedback and ask us any questions to connect with us too.

The Marshmallow Challenge - Welcome back

We are really excited to be back at school this term. Today we welcomed a new group of Year 4 students to Te Waka Ako.  As part of getting to know each other Mr Riceman set us up a design challenge to start the morning.  It is called the marshmallow challenge, and you can read more about it here.https://www.tomwujec.com/design-projects/marshmallow-challenge/

A quick summary is that you have a few resources to use to create the largest possible tower that stands by itself with a marshmallow on top.  It was a great way for us to connect with new buddies and use our key competency skills to work in a group.  You can see above some of the creative design efforts that we came up with.

We would love some feedback from you.  Also, if you have any questions, please ask us in the comment box below.  Thanks for reading!

Blog you later.

Week 9 - Final skateboarding session

This week was our final chance to show off our skateboarding skills.  Over the past eight weeks we have had awesome sessions with our two skateboarding coaches Martin and Aidan.  Some of the things that we have picked up along the way are:

• how to balance and push ourselves on the skateboard
• how to take apart and reassemble a skateboard using teamwork
• how to turn both ways
• how to ride up and down ramps

Here are some photos of Manukau in action last week:

We have had so much fun and we are really sad to finish this adventure. Many of us have developed or strengthened our love of skateboarding through this.  We might even check out their holiday programme and look forward to having a go at this again soon.  

Please leave us a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment to find out more.

Week 6 - Pick a Path Stories

We have extended our narrative writing over the past two weeks to create pick a path stories.  This is where we have the traditional problem in a narrative story, but the audience gets the choice of two possible solutions.

To start with we had to sequence our ideas in a plan.  Here is an example of a completed plan from Dorothy.  This was a really visual way to organise our ideas.

From this we have worked on using google slides to create the pick a path options. We used a template that Mr Riceman made on our site.  It had a few errors in it which we found as we made links inside and we had to fix them up as we went.  Lily has almost got her story finished (just a few editing touches to go) and here it is below.

 Over the next week we will be finishing and posting these on our individual blogs.  Please investigate these further and give us some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback.  We really appreciate it!

Te Waka Ako - Our new classes

Wow, the wait is finally over!  We have moved into our new ILE buildings with the other two classes from the senior syndicate.  We had a stunning (but very chilly) morning celebration just over a week ago.  Our fabulous Kapa Haka group performed, we all joined together to sing, our local MP (and father of one of our students) Michael Wood spoke and officially opened Te Waka Ako - The Canoe of Learning. There are many people we would like to thank, Mrs Peterson and the BOT for their work in the establishment of these classes, Ms Sands for the creation of the sign that was unveiled, the representatives of the Ministry of Education present, the Waikowhai Community for joining us to celebrate and finally the children of Waikowhai, there was great enthusiasm during the walk through and has been awesome energy in the building since.

Our cybersmart facilitator James collated this awesome video of the opening.



We would also like to thank one of our talented parents Mala for the amazing photos below.


We have had a successful first week and a bit of learning together and learning about ourselves.  As part of this we have used De Bono's thinking hats to reflect on our first three days.  Please read our individual blogs to find out more about what we are thinking about our new environment so far.

Week 2 - Creative Character Writing

Hi fellow bloggers,

Last week Room 8 were working on character descriptions.  On Monday we went to the site build your wild self and we got to create a character that was half human, half animal (or whatever we chose).  Then we created a y-chart each, that had our character and the main features of their looks, actions and personalities.  I have included this below for you to have a look at.  This is the creature that we created with Mr Riceman our teacher.  If you would like to find out about more of our characters please check out our individual blogs on the side of the page.

Here is the character description I created from this...

Mix-up (Room 8's shared writing)

Mix up has two green arms that stick out from the top of his body.  The four sucker fingers pads are extremely useful for him. Unusually, he has brown hair that is similar to a normal human.  Eight legs cover the bottom half of his body.  They are purple tentacles perfect for slithering up trees.  His buffalo snout is grey and brown, covered in coarse hair that helps him sniff his prey.  All in all, he is a very weird looking character!

The sticky finger pads help him with his favourite pass-time, climbing up walls and washing windows for a living.  The eight tentacles means he can manages 4 buckets and 4 brushes at the same time, while holding onto any smooth surface.  Once it hits 10:30, his snout twitches in search of the nearest long black coffee, he must get his fix!

Mix up is generous, he often donates his time to wash the windows of his local school, free of charge. There is a cheeky side to him.  Amongst his friends, he loves a practical joke and often plays tricks.  His friends also describe him as bookish, when not learning or causing trouble, his nose is buried firmly in the latest and most interesting work of Non fiction freshwater reading!

Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu introductions

Kia Ora,

This term we are looking more at blogging and we plan to share lots of learning as we get our individual blogs up and running.  We are part of the Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu blogging group where we will be working closely with three other classes around New Zealand to share and comment on the interesting learning that is happening.  As a start we have shared some google drawings of ourselves, some share what we like, others are developing skills so just show our names.

If you would like to find out more about us please check out our individual blogs on the side of the page.

Ready, Set, Design Week 1 and 2

Our overall theme for the year this year is "Responsibility". This term we are going to be looking at designing and creating responsibly.  To start off the term we have been having a go at some "Ready, Set, Design" challenges.  These challenges involve creating something to solve a problem in a small group in a short time (if you would like more information please check out the you tube video below).

 

So far we have had three challenges in class.  Our first was something to protect an animal, our second was shelter for a class mate and our third was a virtual challenge using tinkercad to create something to keep Mr Riceman dry as he moves to his car with an armload of books and his precious laptop.  Check out the photos below for highlights from our designs.  If you would like further information please have a look at our individual blogs for some of our reflections.  These will be up later in the week.  We would love a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment below too.

A fitting end to Term One

At the end of Term One, Waikowhai Primary School held a special assembly to acknowledge ANZAC day. This is because it will happen while we are away from school on our school holiday break.

As you can see, the school hall was set up beautifully by Ms Sands.  A poppy garden was created at the front of the hall.  Children from each class came up to lay poppies in remembrance.  We displayed the crosses honouring fallen soldiers from our ANZAC centenary presentations two years ago at the front of the class.

A group of our Senior students helped by sharing a little bit of information about ANZAC day with younger members of our school community.  We also listened to the last post, observed a minute's silence and used our fabulous singing voices together as a special way to finish of the term.  We then finished the assembly as a syndicate while Ms Sands read us an ANZAC related picture book. You will be able to find this in the sophisticated picture book section of the library.

Room 8 focused on some ANZAC activities during the week.  One of the highlights was the creation of acrostic poems.  Below you can see the shared writing that Room 8 did before we went to create our own from the word bank below.

We would love to hear how you acknowledged ANZAC day.  Please leave us a positive, thoughtful or helpful comment in the comments section below.

Wheels Day

Finally the wet weather that we have been experiencing cleared enough for Waikowhai Primary to have their wheels day fundraiser. This is one of the many planned events we have been working on as we lead up to the senior camp later in the year.  The senior syndicate joined the middle syndicate lock of the day.  We enjoyed all of the different types of wheels we had around the school playground and across the school field.  Check out some of the photos of Room 8 kids in action below.

Investigating Area - Proving ourselves right!

This term, we have been investigating measurement as part of our maths learning.  Earlier in the term we created paper planes and had a competition measuring the length that these could fly.  Over the past two weeks we have again combined our knowledge of flight and flying things to investigate another measurement concept, Area.

Firstly, we identified what we think area is. Our class definition is that 'area is how much it takes to cover something, or how much space to cover something".  Mr Riceman set up an investigation for us to measure how different areas can make different things happen.

We created plastic bag parachutes by recycling old materials. Any leftovers we disposed of responsibly using our soft plastics bin.  Our challenge was to make three parachutes, each with a different area.  We used a you-tube video to get a general idea about how we could build these.  Then, came our chance to create.  While creating, Mr Riceman introduced us to the concepts of variables and scientific testing.  We talked about testing one variable which was the area of the parachute.  To do this we had to keep all the other variables on the parachute as close to the same as we could (e.g. length of string, weight of teddy...)

Once we had made these we then had to test them out fairly. Our hypothesis (what we think will happen) was that a parachute with a larger area would take longer to get to the ground. This is because there is more area in the parachute to catch wind and slow it down.  We did at least three drops of each parachute from the same height and recorded how long it took for these to land.  Here are some videos of the testing phase.

Most of us proved our hypothesis correctly, the larger the area of the parachute, the longer it takes the teddy to land.  It was so much fun putting our ideas about area into real experiments and making something to prove what we thought.  Have you ever experimented with something like this?  We would love your feedback and to hear about any connections you might have to our learning.

Duffy Assembly - Term One

This Monday, we were lucky enough to have our Duffy Role Model Assembly.  We have these fairly regularly and they are always a treat.  This time was no different.  Waikowhai Primary was treated to a visit from Henry Tuipe'a.  You can find out a bit more about him here.

Henry was awesome, he had our whole audience captured by his story telling and in fits of laughter with his jokes and acting.  His message about being a role model really hit home with lots of our students and set them up for an awesome year.

As always, we are extremely appreciative of the books that we receive (two each) and we spent lots of time enjoying these when we got back to our class.  Thanks to out lovely sponsors Mainfreight who help this happen too. Check out a snippet of our school sharing the duffy song below.  As always, we would love any positive, thoughtful or helpful feedback.

Rippa Rugby Success

Waikowhai Primary have had success at the recent Central Zone Rippa Challenge Cup!  We are so excited to say that the top team are the champions for 2017!  It was a fabulous day and both teams had a ball, starting the day with plenty of wins during the pool play.

Team 1 continued on to win all of their games for the day. A fantastic achievement to come first out of the 26 teams that were competing on the day. The final was very close against Dominion Road.  At full time it was 8 all.  Waikowhai won the game because they scored the first try.  Team 2 also had a fantastic day out, scoring lots of tries and working together as a team.

Here is a snapshot of some of the action from the day, including super teamwork and a try scored by Waikowhai.  We would like to thank all of our supporters and parents who helped transport, encourage and hydrate us on the day! Congratulations to Jordan and Conrad who also showed super tidy kiwi skills, keeping the venue tidy and earning themselves some rugby balls to develop their skills more too.




We can't wait to compete in the championship against the other qualifiers from the Auckland Region.  Go Waikowhai!

How to SMRF?

One of our new challenges as we work digitally is making sure we are smart about where we store and share our files.  We have enjoyed working with James to create a flowchart that shows us the process of how we can get our learning activities from our syndicate site, make a copy of them and then organise them in our own google drives.

To do this, we call it SMRF(ing) a document.  This is to remind us what to do.

S=STOP
M=Make a copy
R=Rename the file
F=File it in our drive.

To make this process easier you will see below some flowchart examples from Room 8.
 Do you SMRF your documents too?  We would love some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback about how you do this.  To find out more, please check out our cybersmart page.

Digital citizenship - connecting the dots

Our key concept for Inquiry this year is "Responsibility".  So far, we have been inquiring about the rights and responsibilities that we have as a student at Waikowhai Primary, a student within the senior syndicate of Rooms 7,8 and 9 and as a person who is part of the many and varied things we all do when we are not together at school.

One new area for many of us to explore (and some of us to refresh) is digital citizenship.  This means the rights and the responsibilities that we have when being an active part of our online community.  Today Mr Riceman challenged us to make some connections between key words that relate to digital citizenship.  We worked collaboratively to come up with definitions of what these words could mean.

Our next step was to identify any connections between key words and then join those two hexagons together.  If we found three words that we could connect and explain then we tessellated the shapes together and shared these ideas too.

Room 8 was full of fantastic conversation and ran ourselves short of time, we look forward to finishing off these connections tomorrow and sharing them with you!  We would love it if you gave us some feedback in the comments.  You might even be able to help us further expand our definition of the key words that you can see in our whiteboard picture.

CyberSmart Week 1

Our CyberSmart teacher James come for his first visit back to Room8.

• We are learning to follow the Kawa of Care and use our device confidently and in clever ways.
• Smart learners know their Google ID and password.
• Know how to use their device confidently.

Welcome to 2017

Kia Ora,

Today we spent our first day together as the new Room 8.  We started our day, getting to know each other through a range of activities. It was interesting to find out about our new teachers Mrs Dron and Mr Riceman. Then we interviewed a buddy and participated in a scavenger hunt to find out more about each other. Congratulations to those of us who managed to tracked down a different class member that fitted each of the categories.

After that we spent some time thinking about top tips to look after our new chromebooks. Then, we got to take them out of the box, investigate our syndicate site, and begin creating our first google drawing to represent respect.

Here are some of the photos of our "out of the box" day, we were super excited! Please check back regularly as we update and share our learning.