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.

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?

Manaaki

On Wednesday some of us explored the idea of manaaki.

Manaaki is the māori word for support. It means to take care of, look out for and show respect to someone.

So what type of people can we reach out to when we need it? Here's a list we made of the qualities these people might have:

Caring
Supportive
Understanding
Loyal
Connected
Kind
Loving
Trustworthy
Empathetic
Someone with great listening skills
Sincere

We thought of 5 people each that we could look to for support. We traced around our hand and wrote the person on each finger. It feels great knowing we have so much support in our lives. These people were whanau members, friends and teachers.

How Important Is It For Us To Understand Our Habits?

Olivier Fahrni


How much do you know about the effects of your daily habits?

Do you have a lot of good habits that lead to positive outcomes for yourself and others, both in the short and in the long term? On the other hand, do you have bad habits that might be doing the opposite?

In Koru 1 we have been exploring how creating positive habits can put us in control of shaping the lives we want to live. This has required a lot of self-reflection and the ability to actively notice the habits we have, while exploring all of the outcomes of these.

We have looked into areas like:
- How habits can help us reduce stress
- How habits can help us to be healthy
- How habits can help us to be productive

Exploring The Effects Of Music

Yesterday we had an interesting day where all of the children in Koru 1 were involved in an integrated project day. Those with Mrs Harris were exploring geometry through dance, while Mr K's group were exploring the effects of music.

At the beginning of the day with Mr K, he explained the following values and key competency focus areas for us to think about, as we would be reflecting on these later on.

The Four Dimensions of Hauora

Today we started learning about hauora (well-being). We learned that hauora is made up of four dimensions. These are;

• Taha tinana (physical well-being)
• Taha wairua (spiritual well-being)
• Taha hinengaro (emotional well-being)
• Taha whānau (social well-being)

Just like a whare (house) needs four strong walls to stand tall, we need to keep all four dimensions of hauora in balance to feel happy, healthy and positive.

We discussed how we can improve each dimension in our lives and wrote our ideas on strips of paper.

Finally we weaved the strips of paper together. If all four dimensions are in balance we feel good. We feel like the happiest and healthiest version of ourselves. We are looking forward to exploring hauora further. How do you take care of your hauora (well-being)?

Word Art

On Wednesday, we began a journey that would help us each discover our own word for the year.

This started with a mindfulness exercise, so that we could step into our imagination and think creatively. We were asked questions like "what do you hope for yourself?", "what do you want your year to be like?", "what does your heart need?" and "what qualities do you want to develop in yourself?". Next we made a list of the words that came to us during the mindful activity. Some of the words were feelings and emotions and others were verbs or adjectives.

Some of us decided on our word straight away and others wanted to think about it more overnight.

On Thursday morning we started creating some art to express our word. We used paint to create an abstract background. We experimented with different tools such as sponges, paint brushes and ice block sticks.

The next step was to digitally create our word. We selected our own font and printed it out so that it could be stuck onto our art work.

At the end of the day some of us explained our art to the group, mentioning why we decided to choose the word and how or why we created the background the way we did.

The result is a colourful wall filled with motivating words that are unique to Koru 1.