Room 16 Explores Kawakawa Primary School

 On Tuesday (our first day back at school), Room 16 went for a walk around the school to show our new tamariki around. We took pictures of all the different places and learnt where to find all the teachers and other staff. We also learnt how to walk quietly with our hands behind our back so we don't touch things as we go. This shows respect.

Here is our video of our exploration.

Room 5 at Raranga Matihiko

 On Monday Room 5 went to Waitangi to participate in our last Raranga Matihiko lesson. We learned about electrical circuits and how they are required to power electronics, we also got to make a simple circuit to help us understand this better. 

We then learned about microbits (little computers that are inside all electronics) and used makecode.com to program it. Our task was to first program the microbit to show our name, this was pretty easy and we completed it quickly. Two of us even managed to program it to sing happy birthday to Whaea Christina as it was her birthday. Our final task was to imagine the special taonga in the museum. We had to write a code that would make the mircobit send an alarm sound and write a warning, that would alert security if the item was picked up. There were some very interesting ideas for what we wanted the warning system to be!

Finally, we got to walk around the museum, looking at how a microbit can pick up temperature and light in the museum to protect the taonga. 

We had a really awesome day and learned heaps!  Massive thanks to Whaea Kerry and Whaea Christina for helping us through the world of block coding. We look forward to using the programs more in our learning.

Typing Practice

Last week I introduced the typing programme  https://www.typingclub.com/ to Room 5 to help them practice touch typing. The engagement in this task is phenomenal! They all worked hard to master the levels and challenged each other. One student got 100% and 76 words per minute! Outstanding!
I have put the challenge to my class that the top 3 typists at the end of the year will receive a lunch shout. They are pretty eager to win and are practising at any chance they get. Our teacher aides are also getting involved and pretty competitive haha.
The goal is to be able to type quickly, without much thought, so that ideas can flow onto the page more easily. I look forward to seeing how fast they get!

Kawakawa Balm Packaging

Last week we finally managed to finish our kawakawa balm packaging and we are pretty proud of the results! I am even very impressed with the creative way that the kids took photos of their finished product.
We made nets using Google drawings, and learnt how to make the shapes even sized using format options. We added pictures, natural colours and information to the boxes as you would expect to see when you buy a product.
When they were printed out, we glued them onto card, cut them out, folded along the lines, and put the box together. We learnt that it is not easy to fold card and we should have used cereal boxes which is a bit thinner. We also learnt the importance of cutting and folding tidily and ensuring our net was fully glued on. When we did this they boxes came out tidier.
We also made a label to go on the balm container. These had to be tiny, so we had to adjust the Google drawing size and view it at 100% to allow us to get the right size. We then increased the view to 200% to allow us to work on it. These were printed onto labels and stuck on.

Rongoa Maori

Room 5 and 6 have been looking at rongoa Maori this term. We have learnt how rongoa is about healing the mind, body and spirit through karakia, mirimiri, and plant based medicines. We learnt about the medicinal properties of some native plants and chose kawakawa to use in our oil and balm. 

It has been fun making kawakawa oil and kawakawa balm. Our next step is to create packaging and labels for our balm so watch this space.

 

Picture Books - Something Bad Happened

After lockdown we did a lot of work around our feelings and understanding what had happened over this crazy time. We listened to the story 'Something Bad Happened' by Dr Dawn Huebner. She gave us heaps of tips for how to cope when something big and bad happens in our world. We realised that this information was not the easiest for our younger students to access, so we made picture books to share with them and help them learn the strategies we learnt. Here are some of the amazing examples that Room 5 kids wrote. Hopefully we never need to use these strategies again, but if we do, we know what to do.

 

Collaborative Art

After lockdown we did some collaborative art in Room 5. After two fails (due to Whaea Dana's appalling printing skills) we finally managed to complete this lion and we love how it looks.

Whaea Dana found a picture on the internet and put it though an online image splitter to get 24 pieces. Each person in the class coloured in at least one piece of the lion using colouring pencils with felt outlines. Our only instruction was to use bright colours. A couple of keen students tidied up the final few and then we pieced it together.

We were blown away with how amazing and bright it looked when completed and were very proud of our efforts. What do you think?

Golden Child

Room 5 have just discovered the game 'Golden Child', thanks to Ana for sharing it with us.

In this game one team is trying to shoot hoops constantly, while the other team is running the perimeter of the court one at a time. If a hoop has been scored, the runner must sit down and wait for the last person in their team (the golden child) and the next person in the team begins their run.

When it is the golden child's turn, they sprint around the court tagging the frozen runners, who then get up to run to the finish before another hoop has been scored.

The winning team is the team who get the most people home.

It is a super fun game that involves a lot of positive reinforcement and resilience (shooting hoops under pressure is not easy!) as well as team work and skills in shooting, passing, catching, running, dodging.

Game of Awesome

Room 5 have been learning how to play 'The Game of Awesome' and we are having a lot of fun with it. Watching the game in action, I have witnessed debate, justification, laughter, crazy ideas, complete engagement, hilarious story telling, imaginative connections and so much more. This is definitely a game that is worth giving a go.

 

Kaiarahi 2020

Congratulations to our Kaiarahi for 2020 (especially to Noah, LJ and Dayton from Room 5 and 6).

I know all of these students are going to lead our kura with pride and be great role models of our school values. Well done, I am so very proud of you all!