Week 9 - Our own student led toolkits

On Friday, all of our senior school students were involved in student led toolkits.  Earlier in the term, 24 students from Te Waka Ako attended the cluster toolkits, you can read about these in this post.

Our aim was to bring the learning back from the cluster day and share it with all of the other Year 5s and 6s at our school.  This meant that from 9:15-12:45 students ran and participated in lots of different workshops that help us to use and create in interesting ways.  You can see all of the presentations and the things that the students were involved in on our Toolkits page on our Syndicate Site. We had a great time, found out heaps, made connections with others in our classes and even had the chance to present the learning to our Principal Mrs Peterson too!

Our next step is to share further and wider and we are looking forward to sharing this learning with our families. It is also important for us to think of ways to use these new tools to create digitally with our learning.

If you would like to find out more, or you have any questions about our presentations or our day, please leave a comment.  You could also make connections with the presenters and their blogs too. We would love to hear from you!

Week 5: Student led toolkits

Twenty four students from across the three spaces in Te Waka Ako attended the annual Ako Hiko student led toolkits. This year we were luck to be hosted  by Christ the King school.

The student led toolkits is a great day where we get the chance to connect with kids from other schools like us that also use chromebooks for Learning, Creating and Sharing. A toolkits is a session where  children present and learn from each other.  We had two groups of presenters this year. Oscar and Abby showed how we use spheros at school for problem solving and robotics challenges. Anuk and Toby demonstrated how google slides can be used to create animations that are fun and also show our learning.  If you are interested, both of the presentations are displayed below.


It was another really successful day. The students who attended are also going to share the rest of their learning with the syndicate. We have also included a video of photo highlights from the day in the video.

Week 6 - Assembly sharing time

At Waikowhai, we have whole school assemblies every Friday that are run by the kids in each class. This week it was Manukau's turn.  It was great to have the chance to present some of our different learning and also have the chance to use our big confident voices when presenting in front of a larger audience.

As you can see from the slideshow below, the range of things we have been working on so far this term is wide and varied.  If you are interested in anything further, please comment below and one of the Manukau blogging stars will get back to you.

 

You may find examples of some of this work on the student's individual blogs too.  Be sure to check the list at the side of our class blog further down the page.
Blog you later...

Sphero makes an appearance in Manukau Class

It was Friday, it was supposed to be the annual beach trip day but the weather and water quality was against us and unfortunately the trip was cancelled. We were very disappointed about this so Mr Riceman planned a few fun activities for us back at school. One of these was a coding challenge that involved using our new Sphero robots. You can see the challenge below.

We had a great time working in groups scoring as many points as we could in short amount of time we had. There were lots of opportunities for creative thinking and problem solving as you will see in the videos below.  We can't wait for the next challenge.

Are you doing something similar in your class?  Would you like to find out more?  Please leave us a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment, we would love to hear your feedback!

Welcome to 2018

We would like to extend a warm welcome back to all our blog followers and readers for 2018.  We have been back together at school for three days and have already achieved so much.  This post will have a few of the highlights for you. Please read on.

Manukau, one of the three classes who make up Te Waka Ako (the canoe of learning) are a digital class. This meant that for many of our Year 5s, new to the senior school, got to unbox their new learning device.  Once we discussed how to best look after these valuable resources we were underway.  All students did an amazing job bookmarking and accessing their learning on our new Te Waka Ako syndicate site.

Getting to know each other has been a big focus for us over the three days. We have participated in a design challenge. We had to create a shelter for one teammate using newspaper, string and tape that could withstand high winds (Dave's leaf blower). This really got us thinking, talking and doing. Check out the photos below.

Mr Rattenbury, our new Waitemata teacher led us through a definition of learning. This helps set us up for a successful year as we know what we need to do to help ourselves learn. We have also touched on our new Inquiry theme of Curiosity.  We have already found out that we are curious about lots of things and we look forward to exploring this more over the coming weeks and year.

Oscar's DLO describing our definition of learning for this year.

We look forward to sharing our learning with you throughout 2018, please check back regularly.

Blog you later.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.