Farewell From Room 14 In 2014

What an amazing year it's been.

Over the past week we've been reflecting on our year, identifying our highlights and challenges, telling stories and looking forward to 2015 and beyond. 

This week we say goodbye to our Year 6 children, many of whom have been in Room 14 for two years and contributed hugely to creating a positive and exciting classroom culture. 

We are also saying goodbye to four of our Year 5s - Emma, Shukoor, Logan and Erin, who are all moving houses and schools. However, all of the remaining Year 5 students will be coming back to Room 14 for 2015, when we embark on a new learning journey with many of them taking on significant leadership roles in our school. 

Thank you also to all of the parents of our leavers this year. Your ongoing encouragement and support plays a huge part in the success of our children. We look forward to hearing about their future endeavours. 

Happy holidays everyone.

3D Model Of Aotearoa

This week many of us have taken on the challenge of sculpting a 3D map of New Zealand out of clay. We began by watching some fly-over videos of planes travelling around our coastlines. We then researched many of the land features that we would need to have visible in our sculptures (mountain ranges, major lakes, rivers, etc). These were all highlighted on a blank map, which we used as our design plan.

















Today we organised our workspaces and started sculpting. We will try to tweet some pictures as we finish, as well as uploading pictures to our digital portfolios.

Land Yacht Racing

Today was the day that we lined up our land yachts for our final races.

As part of our syndicate inquiry rotation, children coming to Room 14 have been designing and building land yachts. For some of us, we were able to build on our knowledge from the kites we built in Term Two.

As with the kites, we researched forces on a land yacht, planned our designs, organised materials, constructed various prototypes, and tested them.

Check out some footage of our races today. A few crashes and swirling winds, but an enjoyable day celebrating what we've created.

CanSail Trip

This morning we had an exciting adventure on Lyttelton Harbour. Our Year 5s went sailing aboard STV Fox II, a 54' gaff-rigged ketch. The boat was first launched in 1922 and is one of the oldest sailing vessels in New Zealand.

We enjoyed the thrill of crewing a small ship. Fox II required several of us on each line, needing coordinated crew-power to haul on the sheets and raise six sails. This was a great activity for raising awareness of leadership skills and responsibilities in a team, which are key understandings we are looking to develop in our Year 6 students for next year.

Another highlight was being humoured by the hard-case instructors!

Our trip took us on a return voyage from Naval Point Yacht Club (Lyttelton) to Diamond Harbour.

3-Way Conferences

It's been great sharing our learning with our parents over the last two days. For our successes and challenges to be recognised and shared is an important part of our growth as learners. It allows us to gain feedback from our teacher/s and parents, while also allowing us to keep a strong connection between home and school. Many of us have been able to describe our next steps and our visions for the future with great clarity.

For our Year 6s, these conferences have been a good chance to share our thoughts on the big steps we are taking next year. While we will be sad to see them move on from Bromley, we know that they will have many exciting opportunities ahead of them.

For our Year 5s, we have been talking a lot about our responsibilities in the school next year. We are keeping our eyes and ears open for those students who will be looking at stepping up into leadership roles and taking advantage the exciting opportunities that Year 6 will hold for them.

Thanks to all of the parents who came along. We enjoy engaging with our wider community and receiving your feedback about what we are doing as a school. It was also nice to see the parents who came along to camp sharing their highlights on our camp memory display (shown below).

Woodend Camp 2014

What an amazing time we had at Woodend last week.

We spent three days challenging ourselves, developing new skills, working together and creating great experiences we may never forget.

This week we will be putting together a collaborative camp journal and reflecting on our experiences for our portfolios ahead of our 3-way conferences in Week 4.

We would like to say a special thanks to our Room 14 parents, Bryan, Shane and Tobi, who accompanied us.

Exploring Our Passions

Running alongside our syndicate inquiry rotation this term, our in-class focus has been centred around passions.

Last week we spent much of our time exploring how our passions can open up a world of possibilities and interests for us. We decided that when we are learning around our passions we often feel like we are not 'working' at all. This linked well with our recent understandings of how a 'Growth Mindset' is so important for us to possess if we are to develop to our full potential.

Our investigations into others' passions and where they have taken them was eye-opening. This video in particular stood out as an example of someone who has truly found what it is that motivates and excites them.

The next stage for us was to do some inward reflection and engage in open discussions about our interests. We've done this sort of thing right through our school lives, but this time our objective was to decide on a topic or area of interest that could provide a spark for us to begin an inquiry journey.

We grouped our passions into five broad topic areas. Each of these areas were given a 'conversation zone' around our classroom, a place where we could go to speak to others informally about our passions and look to potentially form smaller inquiry groups with like-minded people.

The process for project creation has required considerable scaffolding from Mr K, as the deep understandings from our theme this term need to be central to what we do. The enterprise, innovation and creativity aspect of this theme provides us with a huge scope for exploration. The big question we are considering is - 'How can I improve?'. Each of us have now developed a plan for a project that we will be working on, already outlining the research, design and initial creation aspects of what we are doing. Most of us are working in groups, although a couple of us have decided to pursue an independent project.

Over the course of the term we will be documenting what all of our groups are up to via Twitter, but here is a sneak peak at what a few of us have planned:

• Jessica and Lily are taking a out a small financial loan from our school Enterprise Group (which Lily is a part of). They have started in discussions with Barb, our school support worker, to begin contacting local food suppliers to put together a product (or products) that they could use for a whole-school lunch day that they are planning.
• Julie, Ellee, Chloe and Maia are using their individual strengths to design and create a school magazine, with some very exciting features, that they are planning to release fortnightly for the rest of the year.  

Failing Forward

Our main inquiry theme this term is called 'Innovation, Enterprise and Creativity'.

As well as investigating technological design and processes, we will also be making links between this theme and the traits that great learners possess. Many of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and creative individuals have failed many times before developing an idea or concept that positively changed their life and that of others. The fact that these people were able to pick themselves up in the face of adversity and find new possibilities may well have been their most powerful trait. Some people refer to this as 'failing-forward'.

Take a look at this clip about Alex Zanardi...


TOUCH THE SKY from tim hahne on Vimeo.

Can we pinpoint exactly what it was inside of him that made him find a new passion, even after being through an horrific accident? Why would he possibly be happier now?

Could this be a common theme with many successful people? How many other people can we find out about whose ability to fail-forward was a key part of their success? And finally... So what? What does this mean for us and what connections can we make?

Government Spending

If we were in charge after the General Election, how would we use New Zealand's money?

As we've been taking part in the Kids Voting programme through the Electoral Commission over the last two weeks, we've had time to think about what really matters to each of us.

Today we were given ten different areas of government spending (education, health, transport, social welfare, environment, etc) to allocate a certain amount of funds. We were buddied up within our numeracy groups, with many of us being allocated different amounts of money to spread out over the ten spending areas. Groups had between $1,000 and $1,000,000,000 to use.

We decided to simply use our minds, pens and paper. Some pairs were able to agree on most decisions, however many groups had to negotiate on certain things. The sharing session we had afterwards was controversial, as Mr K deliberately tried to create counter-arguments for all of our decisions. We have learned that everyone has their own opinions and cares more deeply about different things, which has helped us make connections to the electoral process and how decisions are made that impact our communities.

Sharing Home Learning - Term Three

It was great to see the enthusiasm shown while we shared our home learning from this term. As with the previous two terms, we have had options to undertake many open-ended projects off-site. Our session this morning was our best so far, with children showing a lot of confidence in their own work, as well as support and encouragement of others.

Dodgeball

Here is the video we presented in assembly today that documents our dodgeball journey this term. It highlights the challenges we have faced around decision making in groups.

We've had to make lots of decisions that tested our ability to compromise and take instruction for our peers. As we reflect more deeply about this, we will be starting to think about decision making and governance in our wider community. The timing of this is fitting with our general election approaching. How could our classroom experiences affect how we feel about our electoral system?

Note: The boys insisted on the State of Origin style team intros!

Readers' Café: Where Are We At?

Our weekly Readers' Café is an important part of our classroom programme. It has developed over three years (initially being an extra guided reading group for low ability readers) to something that we see as beneficial to all learners.

We get together in our literacy groups every Friday morning to share the personal reading we have been enjoying.

Here's a recent snippet...



We are constantly getting feedback from each other about Readers' Café. Where might we go next?

Community Clothing Sale - Update

We've been meaning to post a bit of the footage from our community clothing sale at the end of last term. Thank you to everyone who donated. A portion of the profits have been given to each of the senior school classes for enhancing their physical environment in some way.

All Room 14 children contributed their ideas on a wiki page we created online. After much discussion in class, the money we received was used to buy some lanterns and new book storage units.

City Centre Walkabout

This week we went on an adventure around our city as part of our 'Imagination' theme for this term. It was interesting to discover how few of us have been into the central city since the earthquakes. In our travels we found that many streets and empty lots have been used as blank canvases for artists to share their works.

We took hundreds of photos. Over the next week or two we will be looking through these, trying to interpret what we saw and possibly taking inspiration for some of our own work.

Art - Charcoal New Zealand Landscapes

Aotearoa has some amazing scenery. This has been a centre-point of our artwork.

As well as this, we have been investigating what artists do, how they approach their work and where they might get their inspiration.

We studied work by New Zealand artists like Grahame Sydney, who captures the beauty of our environment and the people who live here. We have also watched videos of artists talking about how they prepare their workspace and their mental state before working on their art.

We haven't just jumped in to creating our own work. We have tried to get to know our medium, charcoal, and how we can create contrast by experimenting and thinking carefully about how we are using it.

Take a look...

Geometry - Position and Orientation

We have a focus on geometry this term. If you've been following our Twitter, you would have noticed the work we have been doing with shapes.

This week we've been looking at position and orientation. Today we discussed times in our lives when we have used maps. When talking about travel maps in particular, we highlighted the grid patterns we often see and how these help us to pinpoint specific locations.

Our challenge today was to set up a scene (using toy animals from the junior school, maths equipment and other items we could find) and write a description so that others could try and recreate our scene.

We needed to use the co-ordinates as well as compass directions in our descriptions. This video has a few snippets of our work this morning.


What would happen if we wrote instructions for the reader to rearrange the pieces? Would that change the language we might use? What new knowledge might we need?

Our Vision For 2014

Today we reflected on the first half of 2014 and have begun looking forward to the rest of the year. We thought about many aspects of our learning and our personal growth. We discussed some questions that made us think carefully about ourselves and we had others give us feedback on our responses. We also learned about the difference between a fixed-mindset and a growth-mindset.

After some honest discussions, we went away and planned out a pathway (literally) for the rest of the year. The video shows how this looks, but the main idea was that we were answering four questions...
1. What skills and attitudes do you really need to develop?
2. How do you want to be thought of by others at school (your peers and teachers)?
3. On the last day of school, how do you want to feel about your year and what memories do you want to have?
4. Year 5: What responsibilities do you want to have in year 6? Year 6: How do you want to be remembered at Bromley School?

We will be referring to our work today when we plan and evaluate our weekly goals. How might today affect the decisions we make?

Sharing Our Home Learning

We shared our home learning for the term this afternoon. At the beginning of term we each received a list of possible open-ended tasks/projects that we could attempt. These spanned across several curriculum areas, while also giving us a chance to design personal interest projects.

It was great for many of us to share our own learning today, but it was also interesting to discover what direction others had taken with theirs.

Chemical Changes And Conversation Mapping

For the last part of this term we will be investigating some material changes. When we first discussed the science-based inquiry theme for this term, as is usually the case, many children thought of blowing things up.

This week we have had some discussions around chemical changes in groups. Those conversations were mapped and we were able to not only reflect on the content of our discussions, but also our behaviours and the environment we had created.

Some interesting questions were raised, so we may conduct a couple of experiments over the next week or two (trying to keep explosions to a minimum).

Kites Inquiry - Part Three

Is it just a Christchurch thing that we won't get a lot of wind in Winter time?

We've only been able to get outside once or twice with suitable kite flying conditions. Most of us have finished our kites, but we just need to collect flight evidence and finish our documentation.

Despite some weather frustrations, it has been a great inquiry. We've learned a lot, not only about physical forces and change, but also about planning, managing and documenting a personal investigation.

Here's some footage we've collected so far. We'll post more media when we can...

Time - Filling In The Gaps

This term we've looked at several types of measurement. In many ways, improving our knowledge of measurement has helped us to gain a better understanding of our inquiry investigations.

One thing we know we can measure is 'time'. However, with some honest discussion we've found that some of us really struggle to tell the time, while a large number of children have no problem with it at all. This is before we've undertaken many specifically 'time-related' maths investigations this year.

While we had a multi-strand problem solving challenge set up this morning for most children, we also had a couple of special groups running. These groups were run by individual children who considered themselves 'time experts'. Any children who felt they needed to fill in some knowledge gaps and had some questions they wanted answering were able to 'drop-in' to these special groups.

Judging by our conversations afterwards, the groups were valuable to those children who opted in to them. Some interesting questions were raised that could lead into great inquiries alone (e.g. "Why don't we just have ten hour days?" - It would make things easier, wouldn't it?).

Learner response: How does being able to tell the time enable you as a learner?

Beauty of Mathematics

One of our tasks this week was to view this video by Yann Pineill & Nicolas Lefaucheux.


BEAUTY OF MATHEMATICS from PARACHUTES on Vimeo.

It really raised some interesting questions about what's going on. Even for adults, there are concepts in the video that you would require specialised knowledge to understand. 

We shared our ideas on a SEE, THINK, WONDER chart and were able to make some connections to our current inquiry theme. Can you pick which part of the video had us making connections to our kite investigations?

NewsWeek - Early Days

Each week we have a number of independent tasks to work on. Some of them are directed by Mr K, but others we have choice over. One of these new 'You choose' tasks is NewsWeek.

We've been running NewsWeek every Friday this term. It gives us a chance to connect with what has been happening in the news, both in New Zealand and around the world. We can put our name on the NewsWeek list anytime throughout the week if there is something that has caught our attention in the news that we want to share. On Friday mornings, our teacher's assistant will run the NewsWeek session and those on the list will have speaking rights. The audience also has a chance to provide further information and ask questions about stories being shared.

This week we heard seven stories. Some of these included the merging of the Mana and Internet parties, a shooting incident at a high school in America, Football World Cup preparations, a Google self-driving car, and the sad story of a missing mum in Auckland.

It is early days for NewsWeek, but we can see it developing into an exciting part of our classroom programme.

Kites Inquiry - Part Two

Kites Inquiry - Part One

Simple Machines

Check out our video from Friday's assembly. We've been investigating simple machines. How could what we have learned help us to make predictions about a machine many of us know very well?

Information Reports - Group Assessment

On crazy hair day we spent time sharing the information reports we had written about a job that interests us with our literacy group. In writing our reports, we followed our self-edit, peer-edit and teacher conference system before publishing. Many of us chose different ways of sharing our writing, from using Book Creator, Keynote, iMovie, Explain Everything and Pages on the iPads, to handwritten books and posters.

After sharing with our literacy groups, we let them critique our writing and had their input into how we could assess ourselves using our group marking rubric, which we created before writing. Group members were able to vote on each criteria by using a simple 'poor, 'O.K' or 'excellent' scale.

We learned that an information report has to contain appropriate language and structure, while also being clear enough for others to read and understand.

Knowing Me, Knowing You - Reflections

This morning we've been reflecting on our main inquiry theme for term one.

We had a buddy interview us about the projects we have undertaken, where we shared what we learned and uploaded the video to our digital portfolios. Rather than filling out a paper evaluation, this gave us a chance to speak freely about our learning and have the video available for viewing online. This is the direction that some aspects of our traditional Room 14 portfolios are heading.

Room 14 Children Make The News

We are so happy that Connor and Jennifer, along with Asianna and Kate from Room 13, were able to take part in a junior cricket showcase for the visiting royals in Latimer Square today. This was part of a promotion for the upcoming ICC Cricket World Cup.

It was great to see them enjoying themselves on One News tonight.

One News Video - Sir Richard Hadlee Praises Prince William's Cricket Skills

Careers

Not all of us have the same interests and not all us of want to have the same job when we're older. We definitely found this out this week, as we've been investigating various professions people have, leading into report writing about a job that interests us at the moment. 

Our question is...
How might our personal qualities and interests influence what we do when we are older?

All of our literacy groups have been reading about people who have different jobs and last week they used what they had learned to undertake some art-based projects (see our USpace galleries).

After discussing our skills, knowledge and interests, we've been browsing professions on the Careers New Zealand website (www.careers.govt.nz). We have each highlighted one or more jobs that interest us and will be choosing one to investigate further to write an information report about. As a class we have identified questions we will need to ask in our research, like 'What do they do?', 'What knowledge and skills do they need?', 'What are the working conditions like?' and 'How do you get into the job?'.

We will be making connections between the skills and attitudes that professionals need in their jobs, and those that we say we value in Room 14. 

Erin had a wander around our classroom yesterday and asked a few of us what careers we are thinking about in the early stages...

Getting Moving With Statistics

You may have seen a tweet of ours a few weeks ago about measuring our pulse. We were trying to find a way of calculating how many times our heart beats in a day. This led to some great discussions about what affects our heart rate and what an ideal heart rate is.

We found out that it's good to get your heart rate up and do some physical activity everyday. We learned that this can help us to think more clearly, focus and therefore achieve more in our learning. It was also interesting to find out that a lower heart rate when resting is often a sign of good health.

Our consensus was that we should try to integrate more fitness in our learning this term, which opened up some opportunities linking with our statistics focus.

Here are some of the activities we've been involved in over the last couple of weeks...

How Interested Are You In...?

Each day for the last couple of weeks, we have been responding to a question on the wall in our classroom.

'How interested are you in...?'

The topics change and we put our name on the concentric circles display where we feel it belongs. The centre of the display represents 'very interested', with names placed towards the outside telling us that those people are less interested in the topic. We have one rule - Don't judge.

The reason for this was to provide an interesting discussion point for when we enter the classroom each morning. It also links with our inquiry theme, helping us to understand that we share interests, but we are also interested in different things. This adds to our understanding of uniqueness and diversity.

There have been many lively discussions around this display that have carried over into learning conversations about topics we would like to investigate further.

Check out some of our responses. What do they tell us?

Learner Licences

These play an important part in developing a culture of learning in our classroom. They allow us to identify learning role models, as well as giving us a clear vision of what great learners do.

Learner licences are not necessarily for 'high-achieving' children. They recognise those who always display a love of learning and attitudes that we truly value. Their peers have identified them as having these characteristics. An achievement to take great pride in.

Writing Process - Information Reports

We are well underway with our report writing focus.

How will we know when we have written an information report that ticks all the boxes?

This week we've been developing a better understanding of the process required. Beginning with asking the right questions and developing an understanding of the topic, through to the editing and sharing stages, we've been working our way through a step-by-step process.

This pyramid has been a guide to our learning this week. The reflective questions at each stage have provided a point for daily discussion...

In taking ownership of our learning, we have been using our general class writing process to keep track of the stage we are at. This emphasises editing routines, something we are working hard on, where we self-edit, peer-edit, then communicate that we are ready for a teacher conference (in green).

We are looking forward to sharing more of our writing in a range of mediums. 

Personal Treasures

Today we shared some of our personal treasures.

We were able to share a part of ourselves with our peers. Some of the back-stories behind our items had a lot of meaning to us and represented who we are and powerful experiences we have had. From memories of loved ones who have passed away, to family stories and our interests, we learned something special about each other. In many cases, we learned something about ourselves and the diversity that is represented in our classroom.

Take a look...



Over the next two weeks, we will be sharing more family stories and experiences that have helped shape who we are.

25:1

Twenty-five children. One teacher.

25:1 is an idea we have been referring to this week.

If it would take Mr K twenty-five minutes to tidy up our classroom, it would take the children in our class one minute to do this together.

What other situations can you think of where 25:1 could be applied?

Numeracy - Buddy Challenges

This week we were paired up with a buddy from our numeracy group.

Our task was to...

• Create a maths test for a buddy using certain criteria.
• Create an answer sheet for the test. 
• Swap and complete. 

Each of our numeracy groups had different types of questions that their tests had to contain.

What did we already know about numeracy, our buddy and ourselves? What could we learn?

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By doing this task, we were able to...

• Reinforce our learning by teaching others.
• Fill in any gaps in our learning (as we notice things that our peers know and we don't).
• Have strategies explained in 'child-speak'.
• Be reflective about our abilities and notice the skills we need to develop.

Task: Collaborating

This week we've been asking questions about celebrations and festivals around the world. After discussing traditional kiwi celebrations and our experiences, we've been looking into other cultures with the hope of making connections between the purposes of their celebrations and our own (and with each other).

We're very lucky to have a diverse group of learners in our class. Listening to stories of cultural traditions in Afghanistan, the United States and the Pacific Islands from Shukoor, Logan, Kyan and Matthew has provided a great insight into celebrations around the world. It has also given us ideas for questions we would ask about others that we research. Thank you boys for your input.

Collaboration has also been a focus for us in our research. This is a graphic we've been discussing with regards to this...


It tells us that collaboration is about working together to achieve something. Sometimes we aren't doing the same thing when we collaborate. Sometimes it is better to be finding out different things and have different jobs, then come together and communicate what we have learned to create something great as a team.

Over the coming weeks, we will be reflecting on and investigating how we can better collaborate.

TASK: Watch the video below. It features a remake of a popular festival in Europe. Can we work together to gather lots of information about this festival? See what you can find out and leave a comment (think WWWWWH).

If you see that someone has already mentioned what you were going to say, challenge yourself to find some new information!