Cluster Tech Challenge

We recently had our cluster technology challenge. Our class and Room 5 at Bamford School took part.

The idea was that we would be undertaking the same challenges from our own schools, but would key an eye out (digitally) about how the other teams were doing.

The first challenge was to build a free-standing tower using certain materials that could raise a flag.

The second challenge was a paper planes contest. Students could enter both a 'flight distance' and a 'flight time' competition.

These activities linked well with our Forces and Motion theme, so children were able to use some of the language and scientific terms we have been learning about.

Thanks to Wayne for coming along, giving a hand and showing us your own paper plane designs.



Check out the Linwood Connected Kids blog for some of our reflections and more info.

Our Window Bottle Garden

We are excited to finally have our window bottle garden planted. This has been a side project to our Consumerism unit from last term, when we watched a TED Talk about people growing their own vegetables in high-rise apartments. We liked the idea so much we started searching for ideas on how we could make simple planting systems in our classroom.

Take a look at how our finished garden is looking...



We would like to say a special thanks to Yvonne and Emily for the plants and seeds, Wayne for his handy work with a drill, and Sheryl for her gardening tips and support mucking in.

Along with the team in Room 14, this was a real team effort.

Keeping Our Vision In Focus And Responsive Goal Setting

Term 4 always seems to fly by so fast. Sometimes we forget to step back and think about how we are going and to reflect on our progress.

Last week we spent time discussing many of our successes this year as a class. Our units of inquiry were mentioned, and many of us thought that overall we have a very positive learning environment (which was part of the vision we created for 2015 back in Term 1, to "Contribute to a positive learning environment").

In fact, we spent several weeks at the beginning of the year outlining what kind of learning environment we wanted, along with what we expected of ourselves and others. The question we have been asking this week is - 'How can we keep our vision in focus?'

We really want to end the year on a high. Last week was about identifying those goals that keep popping up in our individual planners, which we have not yet mastered. This is responsive goal setting. Two aspects of our vision are that we "Strive for excellence" and we "Own our learning". Along with identifying key skills and attitudes as goals for this term, we have been taking ownership of them, asking what mastery will look like and knowing the point at which they will be achieved.

We can't wait to achieve these ones.

Our Ski Trip

Yesterday was a great day.
We're so lucky in New Zealand to have access to experiences like this!

Thank you again to all of the parents who came along.
We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!

Room 14 Student Survey Results

In Room 14 we try to make ongoing reflection a regular part of our learning programme.

Today we have compiled some of the results of a class survey we have completed. This idea has been adapted from another class blog. We have also added some of our own questions.

It was interesting for us to discuss these pie graphs this afternoon. Some of the questions had other options for children to choose from, but because none were picked, only chosen options are shown on the graph legends.

We thought that the results overall were very positive. Some of us have created some new goals as a result of today's discussions.

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.

More Bikes, Less Cars: What Would The People Say?

Before school this morning, two of our early arrivers, Phoebe and Reuben, went with Mr K to take some photographs of the car wreckers yard behind our school.

When school began we started by discussing 'sustainability' as a class. We also added two new words to our vocabulary - 'renewable' and 'nonrenewable'. We identified examples of things that we use which fell into both of these categories.

Phoebe and Reuben shared their photos and we watched a video about the life cycle of a car. We found that a lot of the reusable parts of a car are recycled. However, we also found out that the leftovers went to landfill (the dump). Apparently, people own 9 cars on average in their lifetimes. We discussed what happens to these after we finish with them, as well as the fuel used to run each car while it is in use. Our conclusion was that petrol-powered cars are not really sustainable.

We made lists of modes of transport that we thought were more sustainable than cars. Many of us came up with decent-sized lists. Some things included skateboards, sail boats, bicycles, rollerblades, electric trains, handcars (thanks Jacob) and walking.

When asked which of these things could be used more by a large number of people, through a voting system we thought that bicycles were the smartest choice. But would the community be willing to use bicycles more? We found this video about how people are reusing bicycles in Havana.

Next, we were split into groups for a circle of viewpoints routine. Each group was asked to discuss how they felt about the possibility of new laws being introduced that meant more bicycles and less cars on the road. Our thoughts were displayed on the wall.

The groups were:

• Car salespeople who sell new vehicles
• Adults who drive cars and use them everyday
• People who work in car wreckers yards
• Us (children)

Now it was role-play time. Mr K announced that he was the mayor and would like to hold a town meeting. We went out to the netball courts, mixed ourselves up so we weren't beside all of the people who we had been working with and gathered together. 

The mayor said that he was thinking of creating some new laws and wanted the community's opinions. A microphone was passed around when someone had something to say. We mentioned some of the points we wrote down in our groups beforehand and also responded to what others were saying. This was a lot of fun because many of us had created make-believe identities and put on different voices!

After the meeting we got together (as ourselves) and discussed the arguments people put forward, while also putting the spotlight on those who we thought were great contributors to the activity. Quaylen's performance, as Professor Jones from Lincoln who didn't want to bike for two hours to work, was a highlight for many. 

The next stage was to do some shared writing with a buddy, on a Google Docs template, about whether we think more should be done to increase the number of bicycle users, while decreasing the number of cars on the road.

We will soon be sharing our writing with the class. The pieces that we believe are fantastic examples will be on display in our classroom. 

We have also started designing our own modern bicycles and making models of them with construction wire. Although, this is proving a lot harder than we imagined! Keep an eye on Twitter for updates. 

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. 

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.

Organisation And Working Together

In Room 14 we are constantly trying to improve our classroom routines and systems.

Like many other classes, we all have jobs that we are responsible for each day. These are changed every two weeks. We have the usual jobs, like recycling monitors and children who manage our iPads and computers, but we also have some other interesting ones. Jacob, for example, has been an outstanding meteorologist (who presents the daily weather report at our morning class meetings) when given the opportunity.

Whatever the job, all of them link together to help our classroom to run smoothly. We value contributing to a positive learning environment.

This term we have been thinking a lot about how we can be more organised. Some of us had made some big shifts in our personal organisation, which is evident in our weekly planners and learner licence discussions.

As we are nearing the halfway mark for 2015, it is great to see everyone taking responsibility for their roles and supporting each other to strengthen our routines and systems. We believe that a great class does these things well.

We think that this timelapse shows what organisation in Room 14 looks like. This is from the end of the day today - our daily routine where we complete our planners and take care of our individual jobs before our daily reflection and discussion box sharing.

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? 

Today's Meet - An Introduction

This afternoon we used Today's Meet for the first time. This is a backchannel chat platform designed for classroom teachers and learners. A backchannel is often a conversation that goes on alongside an activity, presentation or discussion.

We used it to get all of our views on a couple of ideas we have been talking about recently in Room 14. These included things like allowing private messaging on USpace, our classroom responsibilities and the prospect of a Genius Hour type initiative.

A teacher can simply set up a chatroom through the Today's Meet website, set a timeframe for the chatroom to be live, and away you go. All the children need to do is follow the page link given to them by the teacher and enter their first name. From there, children are in a secure chatroom where they can write to each other about a given topic. This is similar to how many people use Twitter.

It was great to see how engaged we all were in this new way (for us) of sharing our ideas. We know that we have other means to perform similar tasks, as pointed out by Phoebe in the video below, but this website could really prove to be useful in many situations. It's exciting to add another tool to our Room 14 kit.



Another nice aspect of today was that half of us weren't even in the classroom! It was so hot that many of us with learner licences were sharing our ideas from outside.

The transcript of this first Meet will be printed and displayed on our foyer wall tomorrow if parents are interested in having a read.

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.

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.

Air Force Museum

We had a fantastic trip to the Air Force Museum today.

Our visit was divided into two parts: A scavenger hunt around the museum, and a classroom lesson about the ANZACs at Gallipoli.

Our museum guide, Chris, led the classroom lesson and gave us a great insight into the Gallipoli campaign, including what it would have been like for the soldiers who fought there. We also learned about NZ's involvement in WWII's Pacific conflicts.

Earlier, we split into groups and spent time exploring the museum. Take a look at this video, which follows the Iron Men literacy group (plus Jess) on their scavenger hunt. They were so enthusiastic and asked some interesting questions…



We would like to say a special thank you to our parents - Wayne, Sonya and Sharon who accompanied us.

Room 14 Story Workshop - Drafting

We have had some very peaceful mornings this week in Room 14. All of us have been drafting the stories that we have been writing through our Story Workshop process.

For two weeks now, we have been working on our own individual story, with the end goal of every child having a bound book on our class bookshelf.

Some children have already been publishing on Google Drive (a great place to write and receive teacher feedback), which will be printed. Those in the publishing phase have also been creating their cover art and a blurb in order to complete their project.

It has been very interesting reflecting on the Story Workshop concept from a teaching perspective, as we can see promising outcomes arising.

Have a listen to Kerryn, Quaylen and Jacob discussing the stories they are writing and attempting to articulate their creative process.

Room 14 Story Workshop

Many classrooms at our school have been running Story Workshops this year. This is based on an idea that myself and several other teachers witnessed in another school during a professional development trip last year. The concept of Story Workshop is driven by us exploring the role of the arts in literacy. See some of the other Bromley School class blogs for information about how it has been used in their contexts.

In Room 14, we have used an adaptation of this concept to generate the 'spark' for stories we are currently writing. Today all of us were given time (all morning) and choice when moving around different stations. Although some prompts have been provided for the children to help with initial thoughts, it has been interesting to see that very few children have stuck with the obvious ideas present in these prompts, taking inspiration and opting to go in a completely different direction. This may be because moving around a number of stations helped to bring more ideas together.

Engagement has been great, with many children already planning and drafting their ideas, with the goal of writing a chapter book they can be proud of. We have constantly been referring to the idea that we are authors, taking ownership of our stories and self-monitoring our writing to a high standard.

Our video shows the first session, until our morning tea break.



Keep an eye on our Twitter and USpace accounts for more information about our stories as they are created.

Learning Environments - What Is Important To Us?

Today we've continued to sculpt our essential agreement for 2015. It's been fantastic to hear what all of us see as important. In particular, our discussions about what we expect of our peers has been very insightful. Questions such as - "What are the positive and negative effects of working with others?" and "Do we always expect our peers to help us when we ask?" have definitely required us to draw on more past experiences, as well as generate some valuable inward reflection.

Room 14 children from 2014 have been grouped together and it has been interesting to hear their opinions, which they have been passing on to our new learners.

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.