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.

Ōtautahi Pizza Project - Part One

Mr K's literacy groups have begun a new project. We are creating a website that will contain recipes for pizzas we have made - all named after some of our favourite places in Christchurch.

We hope to enter the website into the Grow Waitaha DigiAwards, which has a theme this year of celebrating innovation in Ōtautahi. Our creation will be submitted in the website category.

To start with, we set up a Trello board that we could use to track parts of the project that we need to do, are currently doing, and have done. It has been a great tool to display where we are at daily. Some of the initial tasks we have been working on are researching different types of pizzas, finding out what pizzas people like, designing our own pizzas and investigating ingredients. We have also needed to carry out organisational tasks, like deciding on our groups and planning the purchase of ingredients.

In Term One we took part in the Food for Thought programme through the Heart Foundation. We learned a lot about healthy diets and lifestyles, and the facilitator left us with a $60 Pak n Save gift card to put on a healthy lunch. With that money, we decided it could be used to purchase the pizza ingredients, so teachers did not just put on a lunch, but we designed and made it ourselves.

We decided on the name 'Ōtautahi Pizza' for our website. Then Mr K created a design brief for us to create a logo for it. This was loads of fun and many of us made entries for the competition. Some of the requirements included the logos being professional looking, using appropriate colours and that they must be our own designs.

To choose a logo, Mr K set up a Google Form for us to vote on which design we liked best. Arona's design, with a red and black background was the one that most of us chose, although many of the others will be put on our website for viewing.
Here is Arona's chosen design:



The designing of our pizzas took two weeks. This included lots of group discussions, negotiating ideas, exploring different herbs and spices, and using the Pak n Save website to calculate prices. Many of us have also been using the Tayasui Sketches School app to draw our ideas to show what we are making visually. This is also the tool many of us used for our logo designs.



In groups, we made sure that all the ingredients came under $60 in total. Last night Mr K took our shopping lists to the supermarket and picked up the ingredients we asked for. Guess what? It came to $59.71! Nice work on our behalf to make the most of the gift card.

This morning we organised roles within our groups, like someone to construct the pizza base, someone to put on the toppings, a videographer, and a group manager. Everyone managed their roles so well and the morning was a real success. We were so proud of how the pizzas turned out and we are looking forward to constructing our website and sharing the recipes with you, including some other interesting site sections we are planning.

And yes, they tasted really good!

We would like to say a special thanks to Sheryl, who helped us create the pizza bases and prepare the toppings during organisation time.

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!

Finding out more about the Matariki stars

During week 9 Mrs Harris's literacy group did a project based on the Matariki Stars.

First, we watched a video of the stars. This prompted some discussion about Matariki and the solar system. We wrote down what we already know about Matariki on a sticky note. Many of us already knew what Matariki is and that there are 7 stars in the constellation.

Next, we did some research about the Matariki stars. We discovered that they all have different personalities and strengths. Mrs Harris told us to imagine what they would look like if they were human. We all chose our favourite Matariki star:

"My favourite one would probably be Tupu-a-rangi because she has the power of singing and also to heal animals and the forest" - Levi

"My favourite is Tupu-a-nuku because it's about all the nature and I like nature because when I was at preschool I always used to climb the trees" - Jahvi.

"My favourite would be Ururangi because she is basically the clouds that blow wind to everyone and make the weather happen" - Hanlin

"My favourite is Tupu-a-rangi because it's like songs and I love songs and birds" - Brady

"My favourite is Waipunarangi because she provides water for the world" - George

The next part of the project was all about art so we practised sketching our favourite star.

Finally, we talked about working together to create a Matariki masterpiece. Each of us had a different job to do. These were sketching, colouring in, sharing ideas, adding glitter and glue.

Below are some photographs of our stars. Can you tell which star is which by looking at our artworks?

Get Cinderella To The Ball! Part 2

We have just completed our carriage competition, using our constructed vehicles in a challenge to see which one will roll the furthest down a ramp.

The carriages were just being propelled by gravity. We learned about friction and momentum, making sure that we tested and made adjustments throughout our construction process.

Here is a short video with some of the competition highlights:


Our next step is to create videos of our own projects using the media we collected along the way.

Check out our individual blogs for these videos.

But, this project isn't finished yet. Wind power is on it's way...

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.

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!

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. 

The Effects Of Music Project

A group of students working with Mr K were doing some musical exploration yesterday. We made some nice links between our My Voice Is Powerful theme for this year, where we can explore the arts in our world as a way to express ourselves, as well as our key competency focus on Managing Self. In this area, we have been working on making thoughtful and responsible decisions. The day-long project was also an opportunity for us to learn a little about the science of musical instruments and how they create different sounds.

We began the day by doing a variation of the well known 'Take a line for a walk' art activity. We listened to Stayin' Alive by The Bee Gees and simply let our hand do what it wanted as it moved across the page during the song. As the music speed up, slowed down, changed pitch, etc, we made different movements with our markers.

We then chose 3 colours that we thought fit with the song. Mr K modelled how to blend the 3 colours underneath our lines, then we each completed our own piece. There is no right or wrong, we were simply wanting to show how we all hear and interpret music differently, which adds to our uniqueness.

Digital Portrait Project

Today Koru 1 had a project based learning day. Mrs Harris took a group of children who were creating a digital portrait.

First we played a game called the elaboration game. The purpose of this game was to take a closer look at some portrait examples. We learned about four different styles of portrait photography. For each one we created a list of what was needed to take a successful shot.



We enjoyed using our creativity to compose our own portraits. Some of us selected locations outside, while others set up a scene inside the classroom. We worked in pairs or small groups to capture a variety of photographs.



To add another dimension to our portrait collage we did some close up perspective sketching. We used the iPad to zoom in on our eye. This allowed us to look closer and create a more detailed sketch.



Next was the editing stage. We learned about cropping our photos and adding filters for effect. The final step was to add our photographs into a grid. For this, we used the iPad app, pic collage.



Everyones digital portrait shows all four portrait styles plus a close perspective pencil sketch. It was interesting observing everyones finished project. They all looked very unique and eye catching.

Next time you're near Koru 1, come on in to have a look.