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!

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...

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.

Is it waterproof?

For storytelling in Koru 1 we have been learning The Fairy Godmother's Day Off. In the story Cinderella wants to get to the ball but the weather is awful outside and she needs a carriage to keep her dry.

Dolores, her apprentice fairy Godmother tries conjuring a carriage out of a variety of objects and eventually enlarges a pumpkin to make the perfect carriage for Cinderella.

Some of us carried out an investigation to see what other materials might be waterproof.

First we made a hypothesis based on some research we had already done about what makes something water proof. We tested paper, polyester and tin foil. We learned how to conduct a fair test by making sure the only variable was the material.

The results were that tin foil was the most waterproof material because polyester absorbs water and the paper started to disintegrate.

We really enjoyed our scientific investigation and we are looking forward to making more discoveries this term through science.

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.

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!

An Introduction To Tynker Coding With Mandy

On Monday the 26th of February, Mandy, our e-learning specialist, came in to Koru 1 to teach us a little about coding and introduce us to an app called Tynker. 

The reason we are learning about coding is that people say that in the future, people will need these skills to perform some of the jobs that may exist. 

Firstly, we had a discussion about what we knew about coding. Then Mandy explained to us some important words to do with coding. These were algorithms, sequences, commands, bugs, debugging and programming. 

Next, Mandy asked for a volunteer to be a robot to show how programming works. Jonty was chosen. Our task was to programme him to get to the door at the back of our classroom. We gave the commands, Willow W wrote them on the whiteboard, and Jonty followed our commands to reach the door. 

After that activity, Mandy introduced us to an app called Tynker. We logged in using our Google accounts and she explained how to use Blockly coding to complete the challenges and go up the levels from Space Cadet to Dragon Spells. It was interesting to see how Mr K can see how we are doing from his laptop. 

We found this session really interesting and our class learned a lot about coding and what is involved. It was awesome to see everybody engaged and enjoying what they were doing. We look forward to learning more about coding this year. 

Also, our DT Tuakana group is starting up a lunchtime coding club beginning this Thursday!

This post was a shared writing piece from Mr K's literacy groups. 

Island Maps And Adventure Stories

This week all of Koru 1 have been getting creative. We have been designing our own island maps, full of exciting places and features. Each of our maps are the setting for an adventure story we are writing. Literacy groups with both Mr K and Mrs Harris have been learning about what makes great narrative stories, exploring ideas around plot, characters, and of course, setting.

Linking with this art/writing project, Mr K's maths students have also been learning all about mapping and coordinates this week. Some things we have been finding out about are compass points, grid references and scales. Today we drew another simple map with various named locations, including a compass, grid references and a scale, then had our peers find locations on the map with clues we gave them.

We will be doing some more investigations involving geometry and measurement this term, so keep an eye on our individual blogs for our personalised learning reports!

The General Election - Having Our Say

Last Friday was the day for us to vote in the General Election. As we were taking part in the Electoral Commision's Kids Voting Programme, we cast a vote that let us see what it would be like to take part in the election. We used special ballot papers that looked nearly identical to the ones used for the General Election in our electorate, Christchurch East.

The General Election - What Are The Party Policies?

It has been a very interesting week learning so much about the upcoming election. We have received our kids voting ballot boxes in the mail.

Here is more information about the kids voting programme. 

After watching this video, we now know how to vote, but not all of us know who we want to vote for. We realised we need to find out more about what the parties all care about.

On Monday we split into small groups within our larger literacy groups. Each group was allocated a political party contesting the election, where they had to research what the party policies were (the policies are the list of things that each party say they will do after the election if they are in government).

Over the next couple of days, each group used Google Slides to collaboratively put together a presentation to share back with us. Mr K and Mrs Harris made it clear that we were not persuading people to vote for the parties, but simply explaining what their policies were.

Savannah said, "It was fun doing the research, because I already liked that party. It was good using Slides because we can share it with everybody in our own group and they could each do their own parts. I asked the group if I could do water policies and everyone agreed. Ava found out about a policy for getting kids to school safely and reducing rubbish and Kelli did some other policies. I was a bit nervous sharing back to the class with all those eyes looking at me!"

Yesterday we began coming up with ideas for policies we would try to campaign on if we were involved in a Bromley School election. We tried to think of things that would improve our community, either to address existing problems, or just new exciting ideas. 

Next week we will be looking closely at some of our policy ideas. Could any of them be worth exploring further?...

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. 

I've Learned, Now I Can Teach You - Term 2 Interest Projects

The highlight of our last week of Term 2 was certainly the sharing of our recent IPs. Outside of the CCC Cycle Safe programme that was run for our Year 6s, each of us had chosen a time slot to take the stage in Koru 1 and share what we had learned throughout our IP journey. 

Kaizen sharing his IP on 'How medicine works'

For some of us this was the first time we had shared a project of our very own in front of as many as 55 people, who then gave constructive feedback about what we shared that included possible improvements that could have been made. This feedback will prove valuable for us when we create goals for future IPs. 

Creating IP Presentations

One of our class shared goals this week is to create a quality presentation for our individual IPs.

We are getting a significant amount of time to be working on these in class and have been asking the question, "What would 'good' look like for me?"

We have also been using an iceberg analogy to think about how we will bring all of our knowledge and understandings to the surface in our presentation.