Week 9 - The Drain Game Caravan

Kia Ora bloggers,

This week the Great Drain Game Caravan came to visit our school.  This was an opportunity for us to learn more about water, waste water, wetlands and our school environment.  The Great Drain Game caravan has an awesome interactive model.  As a class, we got to see where our water flows to when we put different waste in different places.


One important message was that anything that gets into the drain will end up at the sea, without any treatment.  That is why it is important to remember the phrase "Only rain goes down the drain". We did a survey of our school to find the different drains that we have on site and added these to a map.


Any dirty water that goes into the sink will travel to the 'Waste water treatment plant'.  Here, the dirty water that has gone down the sink or toilet gets cleaned before it is released again. Wetlands also do a super job slowing down water to stop flooding and naturally cleaning water.


Most of Kaiwhare decided that putting on the special headsets and exploring Virtual Reality environments was their favourite activity.  Overall, it was a great session of learning. We finished by making a pledge which will help to conserve water. Check back as we share these in a DLO next week.


A big thank you to our parent and adult helpers on the day.  If you would like to find out more, please leave us a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment.

Rights and Responsibilities

Kaiwhare has been very busy in Week 2, learning more about the Treaty of Waitangi. Did you know that some Māori signed the Treaty with a mark showing a pattern from their tā moko (tattoos on the face) or from their area?  You can see them on the eight sheets of the Treaty that travelled around New Zealand from February to September 1840.

Photo: Archives New Zealand

We have started developing our class treaty, to explain our rights and responsibilities as we learn.  We've also started some artwork, using symbols to represent ourselves and our families in different ways.

In cybersmart, we are learning about using our chromebooks safely and our responsibilities for looking after them - our Kawa of Care.

Some of our parents have been invited to a meeting to learn about their responsibilities with their child's new chromebooks too. (Remember to send back the form that was sent home with your preferred meeting time!)



We practised:

• moving carefully around the class
• holding our chromebook with our "thumbs up" 
• typing gently on the keyboard and closing the screen softly, so it doesn't click
• putting the chromebook in a safe position on a desk, and turning it carefully with two hands
• logging off the chromebook when we finish working, and storing it safely

Then we made a digital poster sharing at least one of the Kawa of Care responsibilities. 

Check out Freddy's poster below.

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!

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu, Getting to know you.

This year we are looking forward to making new connections through the Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu blogging group.  As a class, we have made a simple google drawing to introduce ourselves to the students and readers of our blog who we will be connecting with.

It is important that we are cybersmart when sharing information.  Please have a look through this presentation and make a connection with us by leaving a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment.  You might also like to explore our individual blogs. At the moment it is just our Year 6s with individual blogs but the Year 5s will contribute to their ones later in the year.

We look forward to hearing 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.

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.

A fitting end to Term One

At the end of Term One, Waikowhai Primary School held a special assembly to acknowledge ANZAC day. This is because it will happen while we are away from school on our school holiday break.

As you can see, the school hall was set up beautifully by Ms Sands.  A poppy garden was created at the front of the hall.  Children from each class came up to lay poppies in remembrance.  We displayed the crosses honouring fallen soldiers from our ANZAC centenary presentations two years ago at the front of the class.

A group of our Senior students helped by sharing a little bit of information about ANZAC day with younger members of our school community.  We also listened to the last post, observed a minute's silence and used our fabulous singing voices together as a special way to finish of the term.  We then finished the assembly as a syndicate while Ms Sands read us an ANZAC related picture book. You will be able to find this in the sophisticated picture book section of the library.

Room 8 focused on some ANZAC activities during the week.  One of the highlights was the creation of acrostic poems.  Below you can see the shared writing that Room 8 did before we went to create our own from the word bank below.

We would love to hear how you acknowledged ANZAC day.  Please leave us a positive, thoughtful or helpful comment in the comments section below.

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.