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/

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. 

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.

Good Luck To The Bromley Brains!

We are really excited to have our Year 5 team, the Bromley Brains, taking part in the Canterbury ePro8 semi finals this coming Thursday. This is an engineering competition, in which the team qualified by coming 4th out of 12 teams in the regional heats a couple of weeks ago. We also had another team, the Year 6 Bromley Coders, who performed admirably but unfortunately missed out on qualifying for the next round.

The Bromley Brains worked so well together and no doubt will have a fun, but intensely challenging time again this week.

We look forward to seeing how you go!

Data Analysis And The Football World Cup

We have some avid football fans in Koru 1, evident in the large number of students we have getting stuck in to some very energetic, passionate football games at break times. It only seemed fitting to connect some of the learning in our classroom with the excitement in Koru 1 and around the world currently with the Football World Cup taking place in Russia.

Last week some students working with Mr K began a number of maths related challenges based around football. We have done a lot of learning this year around statistics, specifically conducting statistical investigations that have included posing questions, collecting and analysing data, and presenting information in clear and easy to interpret ways.

To push this a little further, students involved in the World Cup challenges have been learning more about data analysis, involving understanding what the mean, median, mode and range of a data set is, and how these can be calculated. We initially learned how to do this by using the example of a group of us and our ages. We were then using squad information from international football teams - including age, caps and number of goals from each player.



It has been great to see students like Wyatt so pumped up and engaged in this, to the point where he has been doing his own statistical research into other teams besides those given.

Check out some of our individual blogs for more personalised learning reports.

We Have Moved Learning Spaces

We are now in our new classroom space. Well, it will be ours for while. Our old Koru 1 block is being redeveloped and is likely to be ready for us to return to later this year.

Everyone in Koru 1 was very helpful, participating and contributing to the team effort to move all of our furniture, displays and belongings to the new space. Things are running very smoothly and we are finding enjoyment and challenge in exploring how we can use our new spaces differently than before. We certainly have more options available to us now and want to make the most of these.




Here is a personal post from Caleb B's blog:




We are looking forward to showing our parents and whānau around in Week 10 during our mid year reporting round. It will be interesting to hear what they think too!

Special Visitors This Week

On Thursday this week we were very excited to have some special visitors to our school.

The government announced a new policy around putting mental health workers into a number of schools. More information can be found here.

The exciting part for us was that the Prime Minister held the press release from our school.

Our Kapa Haka group and two of our Ariki student leaders, Sheldon and Helena, greeted the PM. She then spoke to some of our teachers and parents about the benefits of the initiative.

Flipping Out This Morning

We had a great trip to Flip Out this morning.

Flip Out is a trampolining centre that opened last year on Maces Road. It is a wonderful place for learning to take responsible risks while getting fit at the same time!

Daniel says the foam fit is the best part because he loves jumping and flipping into it. Also he really enjoyed that everyone was having a lot of fun.

Mackenzie says her best part was jumping off the big boxes because you bounce really high when you land on the trampolines. This was also Jaycee's favourite part.

Spencer found the whole trip enjoyable because he had fun with his friends.

Shavanah learned some new tricks, like a front walk-over, on the gynmastics mat. Micaiah made a connection and said his best part was "learning new stuff" as well.

Thanks to Lynnley and Shellon for coming along too.

There Is An Election Coming Up...

We shared the following video in assembly on Friday. It was great being able to communicate with all of our Koru team, teachers and parents about how we are building our understanding on lots of things related to a general election.

After sharing this video, Mana, Lilly, Zavier and Kaizen courageously shared their arguments for what the voting age should be. We had all of the audience vote for who they agreed with on the way out at the end of assembly. After counting the votes, we will announce the debate results soon. 

The students who shared their arguments received great feedback from teachers and parents! They can be very proud of themselves. 

This week we will be exploring what we already know about how elections actually work and what we still need to find out. 

Engineering Challenges - House Of Bricks

Yesterday we had the House of Bricks visit in the hall.

The instructor's name was Perdita. She gave us 3 engineering challenges to work on through our 90 minute session. These included building a vehicle that will travel as far as possible when launched down a ramp, building a bridge to hold 5 books, and making a device that will transport a domino over a 1 metre distance without being carried by a person.

We had a fantastic time working together in teams. Perdita said that we were one of the best classes she has had because of the way we related to each other and transitioned so quickly between activities.

We really enjoyed the session. Cooper said, "It was actually harder than I thought it would be. It surprised me. Especially making the cars. They were a real challenge".


Check out another short clip here.

This visit fits well with our How Stuff Works theme this year and has given us plenty to think about, including giving ideas about where we may take some interest projects later this term.

Our Triathlon

Here are some photos of our school triathlon which was held on the 17th of March.

Koru 1 had 14 competitors in the individual races and 27 competitors who entered with a team. That's 41 altogether, which we think shows how courageous we are, especially when all of these children chose to sign up for the event!

Our New Haka

Thank you to those who came along to Jerome Kavanagh's parent workshop. As well as learning a little about his instruments and the Maori myths and folklore that are an important part of his work, we were given an interesting introduction to our new school haka.

Jerome had spent some time working with our children discussing our local area, what we care about and who we are at Bromley. Many of the children's thoughts around this were included in our new haka in some way, including the growth of our students, the local rivers and the Port Hills over looking our school.

The haka is still in early stages of development, but the children are so excited to have had a part in creating it and look forward to performing it with pride when completed.



Please visit Jerome's website if you would like to learn more about what he does.

The Jerome Experience

Today we participated in the Jerome experience. Jerome taught us about a variety of Pasifika musical instruments.

We were lucky to hear him play the beautiful melody of the Pūtātara (the sea shell horn) and the Nuguru (whale tooth nose flute). 

He told us stories about the Māori goddess of music, Raukatauri. Then it was our turn to make our own musical instrument using clay.

Hosting Our First Assembly

Thanks to all who came to our Koru Team assembly yesterday! It was the first time we have hosted this year.



It was great to see all of our Koru 1 members trying to do their part. On Tuesday this week, we did a class brainstorm about what we might share. Our value focus was Creative. Korban and Zavier offered to take everyone's ideas and put together a short video. They worked so well together and the class were impressed with the final product. Features included some of our Twitter feed, students discussing their About Me projects (which we are sharing this week) and explanations about what is included in a mihi.