Week Six - Assembly Week

This week was Room 8's assembly. A big thank you to Miss McGrath who helped us out this Friday.  It was great that we had the chance to share some of the things that we have been blogging about as well as presenting to a big audience and getting feedback that way too. The Gurnard reading group enjoyed presenting their play and had a chance to showcase some of the skills for our upcoming production.  Watch this space as rehearsals will be starting very soon. A big congratulations to all of the students who got a special camp award for the different skills we worked on while away.

Week Five - Wastewise and Finished Products

Did you know that over half of the waste that is created by Auckland could in fact be recycled? Neither did we until Wednesday. On Wednesday afternoon, our Wastewise Facilitator Ron took us through a fantastic workshop. He helped us classify and sort different types of rubbish (Ron called it stuff) that we create into either landfill, recyclables or compost. We had a quick competition with Room 9 and they managed to come out as the winners but we still got lots of good ideas. Our next step is to play the sorting game every day and make use of the different types of bins we have at school, as well as sharing this message with our friends and families.

After the whirlwind that was camp we have also managed to finish off some of the bullyfree resources that we were working on during Week 3. Below are a couple of examples of wordclouds that we created using tagul.

We were also learning about how to copy and paste codes so that we can embed our thinglink creations about ourselves in our upcoming individual learning blogs, very exciting!  One of the things we talked about in bullying free week was getting to know each other.  Knowing more about each other helps us to get along.  We have shared some things about ourselves in our thinglinks, while remembering to stay cybersmart and not sharing too much.  Here are a couple of our creations.

Week Four - Camp

This week, Room 8, along with the senior syndicate braved the weather to travel to Houghton's Bush Camp in Muriwai.

For four days we were extremely busy walking through bush, viewing waterfalls, building and testing bivouacs in the elements, challenging ourselves on the confidence course,  reading and following maps for orienteering, enjoying the rugged west cost beaches, braving the dark on a Burma trail, sharing our talents and the camp concert and more. 

We returned yesterday afternoon, tired but happy and Friday has been a somewhat quiet day on reflecting on how we have shown resilience, respect and above all Integrity. 
We want to say a massive thank you to everybody who was involved, the parents who helped and the staff for looking after us.

Week Three - Bullyfree Week

This week at Waikowhai we are embracing the first ever Bullying free New Zealand Week.  So far we have looked at a variety of activities to further develop our awareness and become even better citizens.  We have drafted posters for our pink t-shirts, brainstormed key adjectives to describe our class and presented these on paddles for a waka that we will display.  Today we had fun with thinglink, describing ourselves so that people know us better and may be less inclined to bully us.  We have also collaborated to generate lots of ways to help others on a padlet (see below).  We are in the process of creating helping hands wordclouds using our magnificent ideas.  Check back later in the week for more sharing of the learning and creating activities.

Created with Padlet

Week Two - Wild Wacky Wheels and more

What an exciting second week we have had.

 As a class we are making strong strides towards being ready for our individual blogs. On Monday we had a go at creating infographics with the support of James and on Tuesday Mrs Archer from Hay Park School came to help us build up our blog commenting skills. The main theme of these visits was what to share and how we can be positive, thoughtful and helpful. This coming week we will try these skills out as we investigate the other blogs in our Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu group.

 Camp is also fast approaching, just over a week to go. Friday was our wild, wacky, wheels day fundraiser. Great fun was had by all as you can see from these photos. We had great fun taking part and we want to make a special thank you to Ms Sands and the leadership team for the smooth way they ran the day!