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.