Everyone Can Code - Puzzles

Over the past two weeks, we have begun looking at new Apple resources called Everyone Can Code - Puzzles. Computational thinking and designing and developing digital outcomes is now part of the New Zealand Curriculum, so the learning possibilities of these resources link well with our classroom programme.



Apple say that the lessons were designed not only to teach students fundamental coding concepts using a real language—Swift—but also how code is used all around them. Each lesson requires students to think critically to solve problems and then apply what they learned ​
to a new scenario. Students also complete activities that connect the concept to everyday life. The goal is to deepen their understanding of the role of coding and computer science in the world and also to help them think about how they can apply it to their own lives today and in the future. Throughout each lesson, students express their creativity through code and other projects.

Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language created by Apple that makes programming ​
easier and more flexible. For first-time coders, there’s Swift Playgrounds, an iPad app that makes getting started fun and interactive. By exploring and solving rich puzzle worlds, students develop coding skills that become the foundation of their programming knowledge.

So far, we have been learning about commands. Everyone is showing a high level of interest and engagement in the sessions so far, and today in assembly we were excited to give the rest of our school a sneak peak at what we've been up to. Check out our video below.

Setting The Scene For Learning

We've had a really positive start to the year in Koru 1. It has been wonderful seeing our friends from last year, meeting some new people and being in a new classroom space.

During the first few days of school, we explored what we value most in a classroom. This came in the form of a group activity that had us rank different aspects and behaviours in a classroom by displaying them in a diamond formation. It was interesting seeing and hearing about how we all have different experiences, which have shaped our beliefs.

We also had other activities including circle times and a forum through our Koru 1 Google Classroom to help bring out many of our ideas for our classroom vision. The participation and contribution form everyone was important. Just some of the things they wanted in our vision were:

Jaxon - "We look for learning opportunity’s is one of the things I would like to see on our classroom vision"

Taya - "To feel happy and safe in class"

Jarome - "I would like for everyone to be kind to each other"

Chelsea - "I would like to have an organised class or it will be too messy to learn"

Kate - "We should admit when we are wrong"

Archie - "We should be flexible"

Coby - "I would like us to be peaceful, because in our class it would be nice to have a cool calm and collected class well we are working. It would make a difference to people’s learning"

A few photos of the journey are shown below, along with our completed vision, which we are excited about and will refer to often throughout the year.

Ōtautahi Pizza At The DigiAwards

We were so excited to be presented two awards for our Ōtautahi Pizza website at the Grow Waitaha DigiAwards. In previous posts, you can read a little about the project. But below is an article that Atarau, Milla and Arona wrote for our school newsletter. We had many successes from across our whole school. 

DigiAwards 2019

On Wednesday the 13th of November, the Grow Waitaha DigiAwards hosted an awards evening at St. Margaret's College for the finalists. Bromley School entered many different entries for many different categories. The categories were website, story telling (retelling original stories), coding, comercial, Te Reo, and an open category for any entries. Loads of schools in the Canterbury region entered with their unique creations. The awards were given by companies around Canterbury.

Everyone was greeted by Haeata’s Kapa Haka group and they did some waiata along with a Haka. There were over 700 people who attended. There were also many people from schools who were nominated. The prizes were things like advanced mechanic building sets, coding equipment and Chromebooks.

We are so excited that the overall runner up was Mrs Gardner’s class, Kakano 1. They won a Chromebook! They entered a video called Te Waka O Tamarēreti. The overall winner was a boy from Avonhead called Thomas. He entered a Battle Bots game he coded and created himself.

Bromley School won a number of different categories, which was awesome because it was our first time entering and we won so many awards. Below is a list of our winning entries.

Storytelling Winners (Bromley):
Year 0-2: Te Waka O Tamarēreti from Mrs Gardner's class, Kakano 1.
Year 3-4: The Nine Ika Of Matariki. From Mrs Hix and Mrs Togiaso’s class, Pitau 1.

Storytelling Runner Ups (Bromley)
Year 0-2: Skytins Vs Zombies. From Mrs Wixon and Miss Paterson’s class Kakano 2.

The Open Category Winners:
Year 0-2: The Brave Shadow. From Mrs Macintosh and Miss Newth’s class Kakano 3.

The Open Category Runner Up:
Year 3-4: A Special Place. From Mr Cron and Mrs Sung’s class in Pitau 2.

Website Winners:
Year 5-6: Ōtautahi Pizza. From Mr K’s literacy group in Koru 1.

There was also a special prize given to Ōtautahi Pizza which was a $750 voucher for PB Tech. This was given to them because one of the judges believed that the way we created it and designed it deserves an extra special award.

Throughout the night there was lots of cheering from Bromley. When they announced who was in 2nd, Bromley would start cheering because they noticed that Bromley won. There was lots of support and all the entries had lots of effort put into them. Bromley left St. Margaret’s happy and were even happier about the results.

Here is a link to the Grow Waitaha website for extra info, including the winning entries.
https://www.growwaitaha.co.nz/digiawards/

Marvellous Muffin Challenge

Here's what Mrs Harris's literacy group has been working on:

We worked in teams of 3 or 4.

We published our recipes to create a class recipe book.

Each group shared their keynote presentation, which described their muffins using similes.

We voted for our favourite recipe and the next day we made the winning recipe: "The Magic Mars Bar Muffins".

If you would like a copy of our recipe book, get in touch with Mrs Harris and she will email it through to you.

Ōtautahi Pizza Project - Part Two

We have just completed our Ōtautahi Pizza website and have entered it in the Grow Waitaha DigiAwards under the website category.

The project has taken us most of the term and we have chipped away at it during our literacy sessions. Everyone has contributed in some way, with some individuals having a huge input.

You can read about the project on the website itself. We are really proud of it!

Click here: www.otautahipizza.weebly.com

Gap Filler Idea - Digi Award Project - Part One

Mrs Harris' literacy group have been working on a digital project. We are creating commercials that pitch a creative idea. These commercials will be entered into the Innovative Ōtautahi Digi Awards.

We learned about Gap Filler, an Ōtautahi enterprise that fills that gaps of our city with creative, fun ideas. You may have been to the dance-o-mat in the city or exchanged a book for free at a pop-up book exchange.

To help us navigate the creative process we took our learning journey through the design thinking format.

Our task was to generate an original idea to fill a gap in our local Cypress gardens.

Firstly we needed to empathise. What problems do we have in Cypress Gardens? Who uses Cypress Gardens, and what are their needs? How can we make Cypress Gardens a better place for our community? We took a stroll around the gardens and took some photos to help us generate ideas.

We used the keynote application during the ideate stage. The app allowed us to import our photographs and sketch our ideas over top. We were able to record notes and even our voices to add detail. By this stage, some of us were generating similar ideas, so this is how our digi teams were formed.

So what makes a good commercial? Next, it was time to learn about persuasive language. We needed to convince our audience that our idea was the best. We wrote our commercial scripts, making sure to include catchy phrases and powerful persuasive language.

To plan the structure of our commercial we used a storyboard format. This included sketches of our filming location for each scene, information about digital effects and a list of props required. Throughout this stage, we were going back to the ideate element and checking that our ideas would come across clearly in our commercial. We also shared our storyboards with the class to get some feedback.

Oral language has been another focus area of our learning journey. A good commercial has a speaker who projects their voice and speaks clearly to get the point across. To practice our oral langauge we have been participating in oral language games such as fortunately, unfortunately and going over our commercial script. Ask your child about fortunately/unfortunately, it's a fun game that everyone can enjoy.

We have been busy organising or collecting props for filming day, which will begin soon. We have also been given a challenge to include a green screen effect in our commercial. It has been fun experimenting with the app. After many weeks of learning about the elements of a commercial, we are excited to put it all together.

Get Cinderella To The Ball - Part 3

You may have seen on Twitter that in Mr K's literacy groups we have been making modifications to Cinderella's carriages that we have built.

We spent time learning about different sources of electricity and the important role that it plays in our lives. Our carriage rolling competition required our vehicles to be propelled by gravity, but we have been harnessing wind power by adding sails to our carriages in order to move them in a different way. We actually learned that wind power is a renewable resource, which we know is better than non-renewable resources.



It took a few days for the wind to come up enough for the carriages to get rolling, but we did have some successes. On one day, we even got out the leaf blower to get them moving!



Check out the link here to one of our tweets showing a short video!

Project Calm Cinderella

Our storytelling tale this term is called The Fairy Godmothers Day Off. In the tale, Cinderella becomes increasingly anxious because she wants to get to the ball and things aren't going right for her.

Mrs Harris's literacy group have been working on "Project Calm Cinderella". The project touches on our theme How Stuff Works by exploring and acting on issues that relate science learning to our daily living. For this project, we learned about how the brain works when we're feeling anxious or angry. We learned about the reactions in our bodies and we explored different strategies that would help us calm down.

After some further research into the brain and emotions, we were put into groups to create an instructional video for Cinderella.

Our preparation tasks included planning the iMovie using our story map process, including details about resources and location, writing a script and working together. We co-constructed the iMovie success criteria so that we knew exactly what our movie needed.

We will be sharing our iMovies with each other first. We will then assess our projects using a rubric that was created by Mrs Harris from our success criteria. We also hope to share our iMovies with other classrooms as we believe it's important for everyone to have some calm down strategies that work for them.

Get Cinderella To The Ball! Part 1

This term we are putting the spotlight on our How Stuff Works theme, one of the three core themes we are integrating through our learning this year. The key ideas are around observing and investigating how physical and material phenomena can change, and also exploring and acting in issues that relate science learning to our daily living.

This current project that Mr K's literacy groups are working on is connected to The Fairy Godmother's Day Off, the story we have been doing a lot of literacy based work around. Our project has us in pairs designing, building and testing our very own carriage to get Cinderella to the ball. Each carriage must meet a set of specifications, then we will compete in a roll-off down a 2 metre high ramp. The winning team will have created a custom carriage that will roll further than all the others.



We have had to learn about some key scientific ideas relating to gravity, friction and momentum. All groups know that we need to reduce as much friction as possible, as too much will slow the carriage down. Now that we have built a makeshift testing ramp, groups have been testing and modifying their carriages, playing around with weights, different wheels, spoilers and axle placements, to name a few.



There is a lot of buzz around this project, evident through the number of students who found many of their materials at home (mostly in their yellow recycling bins). We are really looking forward to the competition.

How Well Do We Manage Our Time?

This morning Mr K's literacy groups worked out that we have about 1200 hours of school each year. It sounds like a lot, doesn't it? But we wonder how well we use this time.

We wrote about how we feel we having be doing with time management. This involved placing ourselves on a continuum, then explaining why we put ourselves there. When sharing, we praised those who were able to give evidence and explain specific times when they have or have not been managing their time well. This was a very reflective task.

In Koru 1, we have a lot of systems in place that help to encourage us in this area. These include having our own weekly planners, classroom jobs, regular routines like personal reading, and a number of independent learning tasks we need to manage our time and resource to complete each week.

We will continue our discussions and reflect on time management as the year progresses. It is an important skill to master and we certainly want to make the most of our learning time at school.

Measurement - Understanding Perimeter And Area

Over the past two weeks, those of us working with Mr K for maths have been learning all about finding the perimeter and area of shapes.

Once you understand the basics of what each of these words mean, it might seem quite simple. However, actually calculating perimeter and area requires knowledge of measurement units, how to measure, as well as additive and multiplicative numeracy strategies.

After some focussed workshops in the first couple of sessions around this, the last session was a group assessment project. We sorted ourselves into groups of 3 and the task was to create a video to show our understanding of perimeter and area. There was a one hour time limit.



It was interesting to see how some groups were able to communicate ideas effectively and successfully negotiate group roles. Other groups found this the challenging part, despite actually having a good understanding of the mathematical ideas.

Arona, Quinn and Cole were one of the groups who we all thought were successful. Below is their video, which as you will notice, clearly shows their understanding using a simple playground shape as the subject.

Ka pai boys!

Diving Deeper with Ms Nicholls

On Monday some of Koru 1 went to a special literacy session in the library with Ms Nicholls. We were diving deeper into the picture book "We're all Wonders".

Before Ms Nicholls read us the book she told us that for some of the tasks we would need to work together. She asked us the question "How will I know if you're working in a team?". Some of our responses were:

"Communicating to each other by talking to each other and explaining ideas" - Aiden
"Cooperating and sticking with an idea and trying to improve it" - Zeke
"Using good body language and good eye contact" - Archie

Next she read the book  to us and told us to look out for the powerful message in the story. She wanted us to think about the question "What makes you a wonder?" Here's what some of us thought:

"Everyone's different in their own way" - Te Wai
"We're all different and unique" - Jarius

Another question she gave us to think about was. "What's the difference between being unique and being a wonder, what makes you a wonder, think about it being like the word wonderful. What makes you wonderful"?

Then Ms Nicholls explained the different tasks to us. Each task provoked us to show why we are a wonder. We used digital technology and art. Here are some of our creations:

Top Team Event

Today we had Top Team visit our school. This is a series of teamwork activities that involve us all working together and cooperating to solve problems and complete various tasks.

Check out our video of Koru 1 at Top Team:



We set a class goal to all participate and contribute to our team's success as well as we could.

Afterwards, we reflected on how well we did. We celebrated individuals who were superstars in our teams and said nice things about them. 

Here are quotes from four of us:

Hunter - "I think that we did really good. I think that we did the goal participating and contributing because we didn't really give up and there was times when we kept falling over in the sack race. We didn't get mad at each other really."

Zoe - "Our team did really good. We did well. Mostly our team work paid off in the burst pipe thing, because everyone was encouraging each other and laughing when they got sprayed in the face."

Arona - "My team worked really well together. We always helped each other when we fell over. Sometimes we would get mad at each other and just use a stern voice. We had some great leaders in our group like Zach during the sack race; he would "yell 3,2, 1 jump."

Zeke - "I thought my group worked really well, they would always do their part. They always contributed. I think the main part was that everyone enjoyed themselves. They really loved it."

Thanks to Ms Baker for organising the event and to all of our wonderful parent helpers running each station. 

All About Me - Interest Projects

We are well underway with out first IPs of the year. Interest projects, also referred to with students as ‘IPs’, are independent or collaborative group projects that arise out of the structured class inquiries focussed around our core school themes. Interest projects are designed to be student-driven and teacher-guided. 

An interest project requires students to have a plan, keep others updated with our progress, and finally to share our learning to give and receive feedback from our peers.

The focus for this term is an All About Me project that each of us are working on. Mr K and Mrs Harris shared their finished projects with us several weeks ago, and since then we have been using IP workshop times to create our own. Some parts of the project have been really interesting to think about, like the meanings of our names or where our families come from. Here is what we are including...



IP workshop times have been a great chance for us to develop our self management skills, including being able to organise our own materials and setting up spaces for learning.

We will give another update when we are closer to sharing time, including some of our personal reflections.

The New Koru 1

Over the past week we have been enjoying getting to know the new Koru 1. When we say that, we mean both the people and the redeveloped classroom block we are now in. About half of our class were in Koru 1 last year, with our new Year 5s coming from a mixture of all of the 2018 Pītau team classes.

Something that we value a lot in Koru 1 is having a strong vision for the year. This is an essential agreement that sets out what we want our people and our learning environment to be like.

We spent time this week sharing our learning experiences at school and discussing our opinions about what should be in our vision. This was done through a group activity where we contributed ideas on what our ideal class should look like and sound like, as well as what we believe the role of the teachers should be.



Once collecting and sharing all of our ideas, we summarised them into the following vision.

We are really proud of our vision and we will be referring to it throughout the year.

A traditional whakatauki we have been thinking about this week is...
Whiria te tangata
Meaning: 'Weave the people together' - which we feel captures the essence of Koru 1 constructing our essential agreement.

MAD/Athletics Day Movie Project

On Monday, we learned that we would be creating an iMovie to inform the school about MAD day
this term.
We went through the design thinking process to develop our digital outcome.
This process takes us on an in depth learning journey where we can all contribute.

Normally, we dedicate a whole day to MAD day, but due to running out of free days to do it this

term, we are combining it with athletics day.  

Empathise

First we needed to think about our iMovie audience.

Our audience is the Bromley School community.
Here is some of the information we gathered through discussion and brainstorming.
- The movie will need to be fun and exciting
- We will need to speak clearly so our audience understands our message
- We could include fun music to keep the movie engaging
- We will need to show the audience not just tell
- The movie will need to be short and informative
Define

Next it was time to define our task. We put our information together and created a timeline.
This gave us a clear idea of what we need to get done before the filming stage on Thursday.
This stage helps us get organised and start our next creative stage.

Ideate

This stage is fun and creative.
We start brainstorming our ideas by thinking, writing, drawing and talking.

Prototype and Testing

After generating our creative ideas, we put them together in a storyboard.
We included a sketch of the location, a list of props and any script that was needed.
Then we practised our lines and organised our props.

Finally it was time to shoot our movie. Even on filming day we needed to keep going back to the
different stages of our thinking process.
Some small changes were made to meet the needs of our audience and create some wow factor.

We would like to thank Mandy Dempsey for her help and input on filming day.

We had a lot of fun working on this project. Check out the finished product.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkKLpbm4Wuw&feature=youtu.be

Woodend Camp - A Shared Story

A SHARED CAMP STORY

This is a story of our Koru camp at Woodend last week. It has been created by taking excerpts from individual camp stories that students wrote for their personal blogs. We hope this gives a number of perspectives and reactions from a few of our points of view. See our individual blogs for more from specific children.



DAY ONE

Grace: 

Last week on the 24th of October Koru 1 and Koru 2 went to Woodend Camp. We went there to have fun and for new experiences we did lots of activities. First we went on the bus to Pegasus park for lunch. Then after lunch we walked throw Pegasus Pines. When I was walking I felt like I’ve been walking for years. When we were walking I saw a snail and Rylie wanted to keep it! Finally when we got to Woodend park we had a snack and played on the playground for a while. After, we walked all the way to Woodend Camp. When we got arrived Cody told us the camp rules. We then we got into are groups. I was with Jaycee, Rylie, Alizay, Savannah, Angel, Paige, Willow b, Kiara, Mia, Ana and are parent was Vikki.