Week 8 - Doubles and the creation of Pixel Art

Kia Ora bloggers,

For the past few weeks, we have been developing our multiplication skills.  This week we have been using our Math skills to create some Pixel art. We have been learning how to enlarge drawings using our knowledge of doubles.  As part of this learning, we have also made a connection between doubles and the 2x tables.

Firstly, we investigated and made connections between the doubles and 2x table facts. You can see this in Daiki's example below.

Then, we worked on this activity.  Mr Riceman showed us how to use doubles to make an enlargement.  This activity is also available on the Math pages of our class site.  If you are up for the challenge there is a help video inside the video that you can use to have a go at creating and enlarging one of these designs too.

During creation time, we had two designs to enlarge.  This was challenging but we were able to use our knowledge of the 2x tables to help us.  Once we were confident with this, we had the chance to create and enlarge our own designs.   You can see examples of Morgan's and Daiki's creations below.

One of Daiki's patterns

One of Morgan's creations

We would love some feedback.  If you have created pixel art, or have any questions, please leave us some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback.

Week 3 - Bullyfree NZ Week

This week is Bullyfree week across New Zealand. We have been focusing some of our learning around this important topic. Today, Mr Riceman challenged us to create some word clouds that showed the type of people we want to be and to be around.

First, we came up with some ideas for words. Reading the book 'Oat the Goat' helped us out yesterday.  We added these words into the site www.wordart.com . Mr Riceman then helped us to format our words in different ways. This was lots of fun. Then it was time to share them so that they can be added to this blog post. You can see some of these word clouds below. We may add in some more as they are finished too.

 Please have a look, have a read and let us know what you think with a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment.

Week One - ANZAC Literacy

Talofa Lava bloggers and welcome to Term Two,

We have had a busy start to the term this week. During our Literacy learning, we have been focusing on the theme of ANZACs and ANZAC day. This is because ANZAC day was acknowledged during the second week of the school holidays.

For creative writing, we described what we thought it would have been like in a Trench and wrote home to describe this experience using our senses.  To help get a better understanding we read two picture books, Jim's Letters by Glyn Harper and The ANZAC Puppy by Peter Millet and Trish Bowles. The illustrations in these books helped us to learn and plan what we would include in our writing.

Using our plan, we then created a piece of writing, focusing on using simple and compound sentences to describe what we saw and what was happening.  Here are two examples of writing below,

Daiki's writing:
 Dear Mum and Dad,
How are you both feeling? Here in the trench it is not going well!  It is not good for children to stay here. I am feeling sad because bandage around  my friends bodies. Now we are going to get our guns out. On the top of the hill I can hear the gunshots coming close to me and I can also hear the Bullets going into the water or sea. I Could smell the blood  from the people that died  in the war. I can feel the pain in the injury that I have and I can also feel the dust going into my eyes. I miss home because we don't have time to have showers. I can’t sleep that well because of the explosion of the bombs. BOOM! CRASH! BAM! I wish that I could be at home right now. My clothes and socks smell like the sewer YUCK!. MY tummy is saying I want to have a Barbecue.
I hope you guys are having fun.

TJ's writing:
Dear family
How are you all? The trench is not a safe place for the children. We are feeling sad because people are getting shot, even some of my friends. When I run  through the water, I can hear lots of splashes. The gunshots and bombs smells like smoke.  My dirty stinky clothes feel gross .I can see rain dropping. I am worried because I hope the children won't do this when they are my  age .I am scared because I think I'm going to be dead. I am afraid  because we're getting less soldiers. I'm looking forward to getting home I can't wait to taste  mums best biscuits. And I can't wait to play with the children.
From TJ

We hope to use our creation skills to publish these on a postcard too. Please feel free to leave some postiive, thoughtful and helpful comments.

Week 6 - A-Z Thinker's Keys and Inquiry Work

Hi everyone,

This term, we have focused our learning on Hauora and healthy communities.  We have been busy thinking about what a community is, what places are important for us in our community and who we see.

Last week we watched a video which helped us learn a bit more about what a community could be.  We then used SOLO hexagons to organise our thinking.   This week, during our big class discussion, Mr Riceman challenged us to come up with a place or person in our community that begins with each letter of the alphabet.  The ideas were flowing and we made it, the most challenging letters were Y (yoga studio), X (X-Ray) and Z (we included the Zoo in our wider Auckland community). We have included a picture of all of our thinking below.

Next, Mr Riceman asked us each to create  something to show each of these letter.  Some of us chose to use our new google drawing skills to create this, while others preferred pen and paper.  These are coming together nicely and there are a few of these below for you to look at.
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Finally, we are using this blog post to share  this learning with you.  Please have a look at our ideas then think, are there any other places that you could add?  What is special to the community you are a part of?

Thanks for reading, we would love some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback.

Week 3 - Assembly

Kia Ora bloggers,

This week we were very lucky to have our turn to host assembly. It has been a very busy start to the year and we have had plenty to share.  Some of our highlights were the fabulous poems we have written about summer with help from Mrs Law.  We also introduced ourselves using maths numbers and shared a little bit about how to be Cybersmart with our new Chromebooks.  It was really fun to find out about emotions and use our drama skills to show these. Below is a copy of our assembly slides and a link to our emotions video.  We hope you enjoy!

If you came along we'd love to hear what you thought! If you couldn't make it, please drop us a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment so we can share more with you.

Thanks for reading.

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 4 Tagul wordclouds

This week we worked on some bullyfree activities to support our learning after the pink shirt mufti day that we had last Friday.

We talked about different emotions we might feel and we watched some videos that talk about how we can deal with bullying situations. One thing that we talked about as a class was that it is really important to be able to share how we are feeling (good or bad) because it means we can reach out for help if we need it.

The learn part of our challenge was to individually come up with at least one emotion for each letter of the alphabet. We listed these in an a-z activity in our language books so they were handed when we started to create.  The a-z is also available here on our syndicate site.  Then, to create we made word clouds in the shapes of emojis to present these emotions.  The site is really easy to use and you can access it here - www.tagul.com.

Below are some examples of our creations, to find out more please check out our individual blogs where people share their own understanding behind the wordclouds.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!