Week 9 - Healthy Eating - Healthy Lunch

Kia ora,
In Week 7 we had a visit from the Community Health team based at Starship Hospital: Sione, Hannah, Gina, Brayden and Lynette.

They shared with us about how healthy food helps our bodies to be ready to learn at school. We revisited some of our class learning about nutrients in different foods, drinking water, why fruit and vegetables are good for us, and why sleep and exercise are important as well.

Lynette sang us a song that connected our learning about Matariki to the different foods that can be gathered and shared.

They also brought us a healthy lunch! We could choose different healthy (and tasty) foods to make our own filled roll or wrap. Some of us had special choices because of food allergies, but there was still lots to pick!

We could choose from chicken, tuna, cheese, carrot, cucumber, tomato, spinach, hummus, mayonnaise, pineapple, and apples!

Everyone found something they liked.

Thank you to the team, and sponsors who provided our lunch: 5+ A Day, New World, Countdown, and AP Civil. It was so yummy! We have been busy writing thank you letters to send them all.

What options would you have chosen for your healthy lunch, if you had been with us?

Week 2: Designing and Prototyping

Early in Term Three, we started our focus on Technology.  We gained an understanding that Technology helps us to save a problem.  As a school, we have a small native bush area that has been developed a bit by students and staff over time.  Our challenge is to design and build something that we think will improve the bush area.

To start out, we identified some problems that we face in the bush area.  Some that we are looking at solving are:

• the amount of rubbish that is left/blown into the bush
• the lack of native birds
• not having habitat for insects e.g. wetas
• finding out if mammalian predators are a problem.

We then had a go at a crazy 8s design activity.  During this activity, we are challenged to come up with eight different ways to solve a problem.  This really challenged our thinking.  We then evaluated these and chose our top three designs.  It was then up to us to choose and explain the best idea to a buddy.

Now we have been creating prototypes for these designs.  A prototype gives us the chance to make a mini version of our creation to test out how it will go. It was pretty clear that some of us needed to make changes.  You can see a few photos of us as we create these prototypes.

Our next step is to reflect on what went well and what we will have to change as we get ready to build these creations.  Please check back to see how we are getting on.

Week 1 - Technology Definition

This term, while continuing our Inquiry work, we are also going to be focusing on technology and how it helps us out.

On Monday, we worked on defining technology.  There were lots of different examples that we looked at and sorted in our define map (see below). We made decisions based on whether an object is an example of technology or not.  Once we had sorted all of these we then made statements about what technology is.  Most of our statements decided that technology has some sort of wire or power or runs off a battery.

We are prepared for our thinking to change as Mr Riceman challenged us to think of how a tap is a technology.  Please let us know what you think technology is by posting a positive, thoughtful or helpful comment below.

Week 5 - Tiritiri Matangi

It has been a very busy week this week.  We were lucky enough to visit the Island of Tiritiri Matangi as part of Inquiry learning this term.  As a syndicate, we have been focusing on animals, curiosity, and how we can make a difference in our own area.  Tiritiri Matangi is pest free and we were really careful to make sure we kept it that way.


Our day at school started extra early (we were there by 7:30 am) to make sure we made it to the ferry.  We then had an hour and a half boat trip before we got to the island.  Once we were there, the volunteer guides took us along the wattle track and we saw heaps of different wildlife, particularly New Zealand birds.  Some of us were even lucky enough to see the endangered Takahe, we saw 3 of them, which is approximately 1% of the world population.



After that we spent time exploring the lighthouse and visitors centre area. Then we had a look at the rockpools before our ferry trip home. It was a great day, answering lots of our questions but sparking many more, the true spirit of curiosity.




To find out more from the perspective of the students please check out our individual blogs on the side of the page.  We also have lots more photos available on our senior syndicate site gallery if you would like to see more.

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!

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.

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.

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.