Our First Kids Cluster Meet

This afternoon we tried something new and exciting. We had an online chat with other Year 5/6 classes from Bromley School, Linwood Ave School and Bamford School. 

We worked in groups to answer four questions for the day, which included:

Q1: What are your favourite things about your school and why?

Q2: Do you think your classroom is like most other Year 5/6  classrooms in New Zealand? What makes it the same and what makes it different?

Q3: What positive skills and attitudes do your class care about most?

Q4: Make a sentence or poem using these 3 words: Teamwork - Attitude - Positive

We used Today's Meet, which we have used as a class and blogged about recently. This was a great way to connect with our neighbours and learn more about them. We loved sharing about our classroom and what is special to us about our school. 

Check out some photos from the other classes involved. We used the hashtag #linwoodkidschat on Twitter.

We wonder if there are things that we could learn from the children from these local schools in the future. Could we collaborate on projects of interest? What other possibilities are there?

Home Learning - Update

A few weeks ago we posted about how home learning had been a big topic of discussion in Room 14. 

We continued to ask why we have home learning, and in particular - Which activities are more beneficial to our learning than others? Mr K agreed that he would not set any tasks purely for the sake of giving homework and is aware of the many activities that some students are involved in outside of school. 

We decided that the best use of our home learning time would be for such things as:

• Preparing us for upcoming learning activities in class
• Practising basic facts and other maths concepts
• Word study / Language activities linking to a current focus 
• Discussions with our friends or family about a current topic of interest to us
• Preparing for our Friday Readers' Café

Speaking of Readers' Café, we should blog about this soon and share how this is looking in 2015. As a result of our home learning discussions, we now need to have a parent initial as evidence that we have been reading a particular text at home and in turn have entry to our Readers' Café on Friday mornings. 

Our 3-Way Conferences were a great forum to discuss home learning. All parents supported home learning in some form. Their main reasons included developing study skills, practising concepts taught at school, and having family involved in their child's learning. For a number of us, having our teacher and parents together was a good time to create some agreements and shared expectations. 

Since our last post we have had over 90% of us completing our home learning each week. Can we keep this up? 

IP's In Room 14

Over the past week we have begun planning some individual interest projects in Room 14 (IPs - not to be confused with Internet Providers!). 

The reason for these projects is to give us time each week to spend developing our independent inquiry skills working on projects that are of special interest to us. This is our take on some education initiatives that are becoming popular in many schools, like 20Time and Genius Hour. Click on the links if you are interested in reading more. 

All of us have completed a basic overview of our intended interest project, including 2 or 3 driving research questions, the resources we will require, and our current thoughts on how we may share our learning. 

Throughout our IP journey, we are required to:

1. Create a plan and communicate our intended learning direction (completed).

2. Keep others informed about our progress (Which we are all doing via an IP blog. Some of us are using our existing USpace blogs, but most of the class have decided to set up a new Blogger blog specifically for our IPs).

3. Share our learning with the class (This may come in many forms). 

Nearly all of our IPs have links to our Looking Back to Look Forward theme, so many of us will be making links to the learning we have already been engaged in this term.

Our next steps are to develop timetables for allocating time to our IPs during the week in class and to begin gathering our required resources. We will also add our IP blog links to this blog, so you may like to read about our individual learning journeys as they unfold. 

All of our IP plans are on display in the classroom. Friends and family feel
free to come and have a look. We will begin personalising each of our spaces
on the wall - adding information about how others can find out more about
our individual IPs.

Setting up our new IP blogs on Blogger was exciting for many of us.
We look forward to sharing them.

3-Way Conferences

Thank you to all of the parents who came along to our 3-way conferences over the last two days.

It was a great chance for us to share with you our learning highlights and challenges from 2015 so far.

Many of us have created new learning goals with input from our parents. We look forward to celebrating our progress from this checkpoint when we meet again later in the year.

Well done to all Room 14 children for preparing your portfolios and planning your conferences. The meeting time always seems to go so fast, so parents please feel free to come in to the classroom between 8.30am and 8.55am (our Organisation Time) during the week for your child to share more of their learning with you. Much of our digital learning is also accessible online.

Home Learning Debate - Part One

Home learning has been a burning topic in Room 14 this week.

Only half of us completed what was expected last week.

Home learning is an issue that we often revisit as a syndicate, as children and adults alike hear conflicting reasons for and against it in the media, from friends, etc. Nevertheless, Room 14 does have home learning to complete each week. It usually consists of a task relating to a current theme or topic we are investigating in class (often to engage our friends and families), some short maths revision work and our personal reading for Friday's Readers' Café.

It was clear after initial discussions this week that most of Room 14 had very different views about why we have home learning. For us as a group, this is important to openly discuss and to address because if we are divided about the why, then our shared vision about what we expect of ourselves and each other in our Room 14 learning community may not actually be 'shared'.

Here is a video about what we have done regarding this issue so far.



Our next steps are to respond to each other's published arguments on USpace and to begin to critique the reasons people have chosen for and against home learning. It will be interesting to see if there are any shifts in thinking about the why.


Feel free to add a comment with your thoughts.

Term Reflection And Goal Setting

This week for home learning we wrote a personal term reflection. We included learning highlights and challenges from our year so far.

Today some confident children chose to get up in front of the class and share their reflections with all of us. They had thought deeply about their term and identified personal next steps leading into term two.

We all then shared our reflections with a buddy and used the challenges we faced to help us create some important goals for next term. We displayed these on our Steps to Success wall under the headings - 'Skills' and 'Attitudes'.

It was rewarding to hear so many highlights from this term. We are all looking forward to an exciting term two!

Enjoy the Easter break everyone.

How Do Our Memories Affect Our Vision For Our Learning Environment?

Setting out a vision for our learning environment is an important part of a new year at school. All of us in Room 14 come with different experiences from other classrooms and schools, which we can use to inform us to make decisions now and in the future. 

This morning we've engaged in a lot of discussion about positive and negative experiences, looking for cause and effect relationships. All of our ideas were very helpful in assisting us to collaborate in groups when identifying what we believe a high performing classroom would look and sound like. 

Another interesting question we've been considering is 'What should the role of the teacher be?' - An important idea for children to understand that links to where the ownership of learning lives. 

We also spent a significant part of the morning reflecting and talking about how we carried out this task. Did we participate and contribute as a valuable member of our groups? What does a high performing group even do? 

Next week we will be using the thoughts generated today to inform us in the design of our essential agreement for 2015 - Something which will clearly be developed from a wide range of experiences and viewpoints, as we found out today. 

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

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!