Sharing Our Interest Projects

Today was a chance to celebrate the journeys we have each been on for our Interest Projects (I.Ps).

All I.Ps had a 'Past, Present, Future' focus, linking with our Looking Back to Look Forward term 2 theme.

Last week we spent much of our independent learning time preparing what we would share today. For some of us this was a slightly daunting task, as we have realised more and more that we are the ones who own our I.Ps. Although we did follow a simple generic structure, they were created by us, for us, and were to help develop our independent inquiry skills and knowledge of the research process.

Today while sharing we were required to share:

• Why we chose our I.P.
• Our big question and our smaller driving questions.
• What we did and what we learned.
• Our I.P. highlights and challenges.

We were also required to actively seek feedback from the audience about our learning and process. 

Some of the highlights from today were:

• We were able to see and hear about what others have been doing. This includes our higher performing students, whose projects could be seen by others as benchmarks for how the journey may look when carried out to a great standard, allowing many of us to identify what we could do better next time. 
• The majority of us were able to use what we have been learning about in our literacy groups in a new context. Some of these things included note taking, identifying key words relating to our IP topic that we could use in our research, understanding subject-specific vocabulary and creating a glossary of terms, and citing references from a range of sources in our research. 

We will soon be completing I.P. self-evaluations and ensuring that our learning is evident in our digital portfolios. Remember to check out the blogs we created for these projects, which are listed on a subpage at the top of this blog.

We may undertake new I.Ps in term 4, but we will see how our other inquiries unravel.

Chalk Talk, The Environment And Buying 'Stuff'

This week we have been looking at a number of provocations around our Term 3 theme, 'Consumerism'. Early discussions, thoughts and ideas have been meaningful and will seemingly set us up for some powerful lines of inquiry this term.

We began by defining what we mean by "the environment". For those of you who know a little about our Room 14 values and vision, the term 'learning environment' is a common part of our vocabulary. But this is not what we mean by 'the environment' in this new context, so we needed to clarify that this was considering the natural world and all that exists in it.

Mr K then shared with us this simple diagram:

We all understood this. This is how the consumer system basically works, isn't it? You work, get paid, then buy stuff. Work, get paid, buy stuff. And it goes on.

But how does this affect our natural environment?

We were introduced to a new thinking routine called 'Chalk Talk'. In this routine, students are in groups of 3-5, gathered around a sheet of paper. They are given an idea or a question to discuss. Only this is not a verbal discussion. Students need to convey their ideas by writing or drawing diagrams and images. Any responses to what others say, need to be in written form. The outcome here is that we have our thinking represented visually. It allows for students to have no interruptions, while giving those who are often reluctant to share their ideas with a large group the confidence to have their voice heard.

Our question was:
What effects does this system (diagram above) have on the environment?

Our responses generated a lot of interesting ideas for discussion. Most groups mentioned the cutting down of trees for wood and paper products and how deforestation is an environmental issue. Phoebe's thoughts about plastics, most notably that oil is needed to make it, really fuelled conversation. We talked about the distance in which many of the things we buy travel before they even get to us, and what happens when we are finished with them.

Mr K used the coffee he bought before school as an example. He walked into his local coffee shop in the morning for a cup, that was made of printed cardboard with a plastic lid, filled with coffee, sugar and milk. He handed over $5.00, consumed the coffee, then put the cup in the bin. Is that the end of the cycle? We suspected that it probably wasn't. Once our red bin is collected by the City Council, most children knew where the contents ends up.

We then used a personal example - A meal from McDonalds. This led to a very lively discussion about the whole chain of events that happens before we hand over the money for one of those.

So what? We wondered how this system can be improved. At this stage, we aren't quite sure. But we do know that with food, the best way to make the system environmentally friendly is to produce your own.

Room 14's new challenge is to work out how we can grow vegetables in our classroom. We will be using recycled materials to design and build containers or structures that can house our produce. We will also be investigating how plants even grow (!) and how we can maintain them, while making links to other learning areas, like measurement and statistics, where possible. A number of us have already been generating ideas about how this will link with our explanation and persuasive writing focus too.

Today we watched Jamie Oliver's TED Talk about how we should teach every child about food, which was really the icing on the cake (maybe not the best pun) as to why we should be learning about how to grow our own vegetables and how this may benefit us in the future.

Our next step is to decide how we will group ourselves, where we will find information and materials, and how we will design these systems.

Here are our responses to the Chalk Talk routine:

Geocaching

Due to us having all of our Year 6s at Cycle Safe this week, our Year 5s in Room 14 have had a chance to spend some time together exploring something we think is really cool. 

Earlier in the week we solved this problem, as we were revisiting some of the concepts we have been learning about through our geometry focus this term. Stella make some connections and told us about her experiences Geocaching, which is an activity that involves an item, or a container holding a number of items, hidden at a particular location for GPS users to find by means of coordinates posted on the Internet. It turns out that the activity of Geocaching involves using a lot of the mapping knowledge and skills we have been looking to develop recently. 

Stella told us that her grandad, Rodney, is a keen Geocacher, so we asked if he would like to come in and tell us a little more about it this morning. 

Rodney explained to us how GPS works, how Geocaching works, and he even shared a few of his personal experiences of Geocaching. Can you believe he has found nearly 7000 items since he began hunting in 2002?

If you are wondering how many there are hidden in Christchurch, just take a look at this map. 

Here is a video of our hunting through Cypress Gardens today. We used iPads, compasses and our appetites for adventure to help us in our search. 

Thanks again to Rodney for taking the time to come in and speak to us! It sounds like the Geocache website will soon have some new members. 

Sharing Our Board Games

These past two days have been very rewarding for so many of us who have finally had the chance to share the board games we have been working on for several weeks.

As you may know, our aim was to design and build a board game that would consolidate our learning from this term and help to teach others in our school about human migration.

Here is some footage from the last two days:



We were happy to see so many children engaged and excited by our games, as evident in the written feedback forms we created for each game. However, it will be interesting for us to really reflect on these board games.

These questions may hold some importance...

• What does the feedback we received tell us?
• Were we able to keep to the design brief and actually teach others about human migration? 
• If our board game was not ready by today, could we have done things differently? 
• What did we learn from this project that we can carry forward to future projects?

Our individual reflections on our migration inquiry are currently being completed and will be visible in our learning portfolios.

Year 6 Cycle Safe Programme

This has been a very busy week with our Year 6 children taking part in the Cycle Safe programme run by the Christchurch City Council. Our students have done well to manage their timetables and apply the skills they have been taught in practical situations on either their own cycles, or ones supplied by the instructors.

The programme includes:

• Cycle maintenance and helmet fitting
• Basic cycling skills
• Road rules
• On road cycling

Feedback from the instructors has been fantastic, so our Room 14 children can be very proud of their efforts. All participants will receive a personalised certificate highlighting their achievements upon finishing the course. We look forward to hearing what information our Year 6s can pass on to our younger children about being safe on our school bike track.