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/

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

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.

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:

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 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.

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.

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.

How Can We Improve Our Outdoor Spaces?

This term we have been wondering how we could improve the spaces outside our classroom. Since moving to this block, we have noticed that we could probably do some things to beautify our outdoor spaces, as well as create some spaces that could be useful for our learning. This project links well with all 3 of our schoolwide themes this year - Imagine it create it, My place our world, and My body and me (Hauora).

An aerial view of the areas we are working with

Part of the reason why we went into the city earlier in the term was to find some inspiration and to help generate ideas. See that blog post for more details.

Since then we have spent time outside our classroom, trying to reimagine what it could look like if we were to design some new areas. We decided that if we were going to do this, the areas would fit into 3 categories - Learning, playing or relaxing.

We have begun deciding on specific designs we would like to work on. For each design, we have decided that they must...

• Have a purpose - for learning, playing or relaxing
• Be safe
• Beautify our outdoor areas

Soon we will be completing some final designs, which we will be locating the materials for and prototyping. We will be looking for feedback from others in our school community on what they think of our designs and how we could improve them. 

Trip To The City

Blog report by Charnz

In the morning at 9:45 Koru 1 got on a bus a we started our trip to the Art Centre. First we went to the South Quad to have something to eat and then we looked at these bubbled shaped things and a lady came to speak to us. She taught us about them and said what the meaning was about them. The person who made them was Seung Yul Oh. He was trying to remind us about the big earthquake that and how we all connected to help each other.



Then we walked into the Scape Public Art and made a little sculpture of the bubble type things and we used styrofoam balls and there were half one and all sorts of sizes. We used toothpicks to hold them together. When we had done as much as we could we got called up to take a photo with our models of  the bubble things that we discovered. After that we had to demolish them so we could experience more with the styrofoam balls. We had a certain amount of time until we went into the Botanical gardens.



When our time was up we walked out of the Arts Centre and we saw a statue of a man and Josie the instructor that helped us make the model things told us about the statue. Then we said goodbye to Josie and we headed off to the botanical gardens to have our lunch. When got into the gardens we saw heaps of interesting things and we went through Cunningham House. In there it was warm and we saw heaps of banana trees and there were signs saying where they were from. I saw one from Canary Island. Then when got out of there we straight to where Mrs Harris's group was eating.



After we had a little play around we walked back to the Arts Centre and we met two different ladies and went to Rutherford's Den. We put our bags away and we got these black robe things on it felt like Hogwarts a little bit. Then we went into the other part Rutherford's Den to do an experiment with bubbles. First we got into groups of three and there were some groups of two and we experimented if we used a heart shaped bubble blower what shape would it be. We also had a piece of paper and we had a hypothesis on shapes of bubbles and we had to guess what colours there were and after all of that one of the instructors had a stick and some rope and she tried to make a massive bubble. Then we went back to our bags and said goodbye and returned to school on the bus. Back in class, we reflected on the day. People had lots of highlights and the behaviour of the class was amazing.

Hauora Interest Projects - Part 2

This week we have been sharing our recent interest projects. It has been wonderful seeing our peers taking the stage, putting the focus on them and their learning. The main idea behind sharing our interest projects is to celebrate our efforts, identifying highlights, and giving and receiving valuable feedback in order to set new goals for ourselves.



Interest projects can be testing for students. We really need to show that we are developing important skills and attitudes in the areas of organisation and time management, as well as general research abilities. How we use the time that we are allocated in class for these projects, called IP workshops, is one of the areas of evaluation at the end of each interest project cycle. The end products are not the only important thing, the process is also significant.

Here are some student reactions and comments:

Jesse said "Sharing was good. When I saw others doing it, I was not as nervous. I really felt excited and wanted to go up. I feel pretty good about my next interest projects. I learned that I can get up in front of people and not have a big shock. Overall I feel proud of myself".

Quinn said that when sharing he "... Had a good feeling because I knew that others didn't know much about my topic, so I was providing them with personal information. I think next time I would practice my speech a bit more, but overall I think it was pretty good for my IP that I've done at school".

See our individual blogs for our IP evaluations and links to the media many of us created. The evaluation template we each completed is shown below. You can see the particular areas of focus for these projects.

Hauora Interest Projects

Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash

We are currently in the middle of individual interest projects (IPs) that relate to Hauora (health and wellbeing). This has been a significant focus for us this year and these projects are a chance for us each to dig deeper into a topic of interest within the wider theme. 

The aim of the project is to learn all about something that we know, or have heard, can affect the health and wellbeing of people, then share back our findings with our peers and teachers. One of the main goals here is to create a powerful forum for the students of Koru 1 to educate their peers about how they can improve their own hauora, while developing many of the independent inquiry skills that successful interest projects require. 

Our IPs have 3 rules that we must follow. 



Late last term we completed our plans and displayed them on our classroom walls. During our open evening, we were able to share these with our friends and whānau, getting their feedback and explaining how we would be approaching each of our projects.



This week we are reaching the 'putting it all together' phase, where we are beginning to write up our research findings. Some of us have been using Google Forms for the first time to create our own surveys. Especially as many of our topics of interested within our health and wellbeing theme affect us kids, we think we can get some valuable information from our peers about certain issues.



Next week we will be working on our presentations, which will come in many different forms, and we will be sharing these projects in Week 3. After presenting, we will be spending time reflecting on our projects, identifying our highlights and challenges, and finishing off our IP documentation.

Interest projects are not new for many Bromley students. Madison, who is in Year 6 and has completed 3 IPs before, has some insightful thoughts about them:
"I like interest projects because we get to find out about things we don't know. I get excited finding out new things. The researching is fun. I can get a bit nervous sharing, but once I start, I'm fine. You are really proud of yourself afterwards".

Keep an eye on our Twitter and blog for updates.

Discovering Our Character Strengths

On Wednesday Koru 1 learned about character strengths. Character strengths are positive parts of our personalities that impact how we think, feel and behave. If we know what our main strengths are we can “flex our strengths muscles” and be the best version of ourselves.

First we had a discussion about what character strengths are and what strengths we might have. We talked with our friends and spotted strengths that they have too. Then Mrs Harris displayed a character strength and what it means on the TV. If we thought YES this is definitely like me we wrote it down. Eventually we all had a list of our strengths.

Next it was time to narrow down our list. Most of us came up with three or four main character strengths. Then we did some more research on these and added key words to a brain storm. Some of us used the character strengths cards to find the māori word for our strengths.

We used the online tool worditout to generate a word cloud. We could customise this to our preferences and make it look unique to us. Use took the word cloud and added it to a slide of us with a speech bubble. These are displayed in Koru 1 for you to see on open evening in week 10.

Where to next? What does it mean for us now that we know what our main character strengths are? How can we “flex our strengths muscles?”

I understand myself a bit better now – Zeke

Kind of like Zeke, I know myself a bit better now and now that I know some of my strengths I will be able to use them more – Arona

I feel brightened and excited – Lakiesha

Now I know more of my character strengths I’m going to discover who I am more and find new ones – Caleb.

Now that I have learned about myself a little better with my strengths I can trust them and hopefully they assist me in the future, hopefully they will do good into my future – Mana.

We could improve them - Levi

Experiment with our strengths and see which one is the most popular in our class – Zeke

Maybe we could do a survey to see - Jaycee

One of mine is creativity. I was thinking I could create something to do with it - Yossi

Experiment with our strengths and make a system out of it. Maybe that will boost the education system in the school and help all the classes. We could help the juniors with their strengths like junior mentors. Or maybe a lunch time club – Mana.

Make an iMovie about them – Levi

What do you think your character strengths are?