Week 3 - Bigfoot Cycling Skills

This week we enjoyed two cycling session run by Bigfoot Adventures.  Our first session involved learning lots about cycling safety, including important concepts like visibility when cycling and how to put on a helmet safely.

Our second session was a practical one.  We were outside on a beautiful day (as you can see from the photos below) working on our skills.  Those of us who brought along our bikes were also very lucky to have these safety checked by our expert instructors.

If you would like to find out any more about our day, please leave us a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment below.

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.

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.

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.