Ako Hiko Film Festival Submission - Manukau Class

Hi Bloggers,

This year is the first year of the Ako Hiko film festival.  In Manukau we had heaps of fun making different movies that incorporated the theme of change.  As a class, we are submitting "Two Shoes" created by William, Oscar, Anuk, and Sebastian.  We will also post our other finished films on the blog for you to check out.

We'd love some of your feedback!

Enjoy.

Week 6 - Film Making Scripts

This year we are participating in the Ako Hiko Film Festival.  It is the first time that it has happened and we have been having fun starting out the film making process.  We spent some time learning about different film shots and angles and how movie makers use these.
 We then had a go at creating a short film to tell a joke as a way to work on some of these skills.  You can see one of these below.  We still have quite a bit of work to do to perfect our movie making skills.


Our current challenge is to create a script for our movie about change as a group.  We have collaborated on google docs to describe characters, lines, setting and camera shots to help create a successful film.  Here is one example of our scripts.


Check back later to see our finished films.

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 - 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.