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.

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

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.

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 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.