First Aid Training

Today we were lucky enough to have Stacey from the Red Cross spend the day in Room 14 teaching us about first aid.

We learned about what we should do when confronted with a range of emergency situations. These included things like shock, nosebleeds, broken bones, burns, poisons, and seizures to name a few.

When we are with someone who is in need of medical treatment, we now know about DRSABC, which stand for a recommended process we should follow.

D = Danger (check for dangers)
R = Response (check the person to see if they are conscious)
S = Send for help
A = Airway (check if the person's airways are clear)
B = Breathing (check if the person is breathing)
C = Circulation (check for bleeding)

We enjoyed taking part in role play activities this afternoon, where we acted out some emergency scenarios in groups. Stacey gave us constructive feedback on how we performed.

Thank you to Stacey for running the programme. All of us will no doubt encounter emergency situations in our lives, so it is great that we now have a foundation set of first aid skills to build on.

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind?

The more we have learned about being mindful, and our mental and emotional health this year, the more we have discovered that exercise and healthy choices play a key role in improving our well-being. Taha tinana (physical well-being and health) is one of the four key aspects of Hauora, which we will soon be investigating further.

Last week we asked "How can we improve our level of fitness?" We came up with lots of ideas, many of which included getting our bodies moving and our hearts pumping.

After learning about simple tally charts, we went to the hall and did a beep test. In pairs, we kept a tally of our partner's score, then swapped over and they recorded our results while we did the physical test. Maia set up a station outside the hall where students who had just completed their test could go and immediately test their heart rate.

Later in the day, we again got into our pairs and recorded the number of push-ups and sit-ups we could do in 30 seconds. For each of the tests, we also wrote comments about how our bodies felt afterwards.


























This week we have been discussing what we could do with this data. We have decided that we could do more regular class fitness activities and test ourselves using the same tests as before every few weeks. Then we could look for ways to display the information and see if our fitness improves, as well as noticing how our comments may change. The comments will give us information about how we feel our bodies are responding to ongoing exercise.

Today we used our beep test data to create some simple visual displays to show our results. We have discussed line graphs, and we know that these will be more suitable to use when we have done the beep test a couple more times, then we can track our own performance better. But today we created some simple bar charts using Pages on our iPads.

We entered our personal data into a form in the app, as well as some of our peers' data who we chose to also appear on our own graph. Some of us chose to compare ourselves with a certain group, for example, 'Boys who play rugby league' and 'Year 6 girls' were some of the target groups students chose.

After sharing the results with our peers, we uploaded the displays to our digital portfolios and added descriptions to explain what the charts were. Over the next week we will be using the strategies we learned in term one, when we analysed our school class size data, to find the average, median, mode and range of our beep test results.

We are trying to gain a wide spread of data about our own personal fitness, so as well as all of the data we have collected already, we have begun noting down the number of laps of the field we are completing during each 20 minute session we have for cross-country training. We will use this information to learn how to create line graphs, using them to look for trends, which will hopefully allow us to independently complete this process with our own beep test data over the next two terms.

Mindfulness In Room 14

This term we have begun looking into what being more mindful in Room 14 might mean.

A quick Google search will tell you that mindfulness is about attention, awareness, focus, presence or vigilance. It is about being in the moment. The opposite of these things being mindlessness, inattention, distractedness and lack of judgement - All of which can negatively affect learning opportunities.

Here we are doing a 5 minute guided relaxation session after lunch one day this week:

Mindful students in Room 14 will…

• Take the time to stop and reflect at various times throughout the school day, asking themselves "How am I doing?"
• Display a personal awareness during guided group sessions with Mr K, showing a focused and attentive approach to our discussions.
• Actively listen to others sharing their books for Readers' Café and ask thoughtful questions, while being conscientious and well-prepared to share their own books.
• Enter our classroom after break times in peace, clearing their thoughts of negative distractions and getting themselves ready for the next learning session.
• Manage their daily planner well, choosing appropriate times to update it and evaluating each week with honesty and a mindset that they can improve.

And the list goes on. These were a few of the statements we have already come up with about Room 14.

Also, now with our 1:1 system in place, we have begun to discuss the importance of balancing digital devices with other areas of our lives. Most adults will certainly be able to relate to this, as the world of social media and 'anytime, any-place' connectedness has become more and more a part of many of our daily routines, sometimes to the detriment of our physical and emotional well-being if we allow ourselves to become too engulfed in it.

A focus on being mindful this term will hopefully give us more of an insight into our own learning and personal interactions, as well as an even happier classroom. Here is a news report on how mindfulness practices are being used in one school.

Although like the school in the video above, we will only be spending 5-10mins a couple of times a week on the guided relaxation aspect of mindfulness practice, it will be interesting to see where we go and what benefits we see in both our learning and our sense of well-being.