Interest Projects - All Wrapped Up For Christmas

It has been so satisfying for many of us sharing our term four interest projects.

One way we ensure that we are taking ownership, accountability and responsibility for our learning in Room 14 is through the sharing routines we have. During our first I.P. this year, sharing in front of the class seemed a little daunting for some. However, the encouragement shown for each other and the ability to give constructive feedback has grown to such a level that sharing interest projects is a positive experience and a time for celebration. The conversation arising after the sharing of an interest project is genuinely exciting as students often realise that they are the most knowledgeable person in the room about their chosen topic, which can be so empowering when answering questions from their peers.

Those who initially found driving their own projects a challenge have made great progress. Being handed more responsibility and knowing that the teacher is only assisting as a guide was something to get their heads around at first. Of course, there are still things that all of us could have improved on this time, but our skills and attitudes for self-driven inquiry projects have grown a lot as a class.

We had a 'How Stuff Works' theme of sorts this time. It was wonderful seeing how deep some students could get into their questions and how they could communicate some very technical, jargon-filled scientific explanations in a way that we could all understand. Jacob's 'How do batteries work?', Kerryn's 'How does lightning work?' and Izyah's 'How do earphones work?' projects were nice examples of this.








Before putting together our presentations, we co-created a sharing rubric together that included what we thought would make a great presentation, as well as a couple of aspects of our last I.P. sharing days that we needed to work on. We assessed ourselves after receiving feedback from our peers and Mr K. See the completed rubrics in our digital portfolios.



Next year we will look at how the I.P. format could fit in with our learning programmes. For our Year 6s that are leaving us, we hope that these interest projects have given them a chance to further develop their 21st century learning skills and attitudes, which we hope they can utilise wherever they are heading.

Because Of Mr Terupt

We have just finished reading Because of Mr Terupt, which we have thoroughly enjoyed.

Blurb:

"It’s the start of fifth grade for seven kids at Snow Hill School. There’s . . .Jessica, the new girl, smart and perceptive, who’s having a hard time fitting in; Alexia, a bully, your friend one second, your enemy the next;Peter, class prankster and troublemaker; Luke, the brain; Danielle,who never stands up for herself; shy Anna, whose home situation makes her an outcast; and Jeffrey, who hates school.
 
Only Mr. Terupt, their new and energetic teacher, seems to know how to deal with them all. He makes the classroom a fun place, even if he doesn’t let them get away with much . . . until the snowy winter day when an accident changes everything—and everyone."



We won't give away the whole story, but this book has generated a lot of discussion in our classroom about different themes, including our own learning environment, relationships and growing up. It was fascinating to notice the characters change as the story went on.

One day we sent out this tweet and the American author himself retweeted it overnight!

This week we used Google Forms to gather our opinions about the story.
Here are a couple of the findings...

After we each voted, our overall rating for Because of Mr Terupt was 9.3/10.

A number of Room 14 children have already been looking to track down the second book in the series through the Christchurch City Libraries website.

We View A Great Learner As...

'Organisation Time' is the name we give to the 8.30am - 8.55am period before school starts. We are conscious in Room 14 of the importance of being organised, and having the time to get organised, and the positive effect this has on getting us in the right space for learning.

When we arrive in the classroom each morning, there may be a short task (often optional) for us to complete before school begins, along with the expectation that we use this time to organise our stationery, make sure our devices are charged, check in on our weekly goals, etc.

Last Friday during organisation time we had a task to complete. We were each asked to write down what we believe are the 3 most important traits of a great learner in Room 14. All of the words have been collated and are displayed in the word cloud below. Those that were mentioned more often appear larger.

It's interesting to think about what we see as important.

Is this is good set of traits? Are we missing anything really important? 

Consumerism - Sharing Our Thoughts and Ideas

We have had a busy last couple of weeks preparing to share our individual learning about our Consumerism theme. These are the projects that were outlined in this previous post.

One of the challenges we faced when having our own Interest Projects in Term 2 was managing our time. So, when we were given the presentation date for our Consumerism projects, Mr K also shared an individual timeline with each of us via Google Docs. We had to complete an outline of how we would be using our independent learning time at school in order to be ready to present on the sharing day. In a sense, we had to 'plan backwards', having an end product in mind, then deciding what steps were needed to get there and how much time would be required to complete each of these steps.

We developed project assessment rubrics for each of the project mediums we chose (animation/screen-casting, TED style speech, or posters). These rubrics were also shared with us via Google Drive, where Mr K wrote his feedback on our projects while we were sharing to the class, and we completed a self-reflection section on the same document after. Over the coming weeks, we will be adding footage of ourselves sharing and/or other images from our presentations. This could be a very effective way for teachers and students to co-construct learning documentation going forward.

It was great to see the differences in the projects that were shared. The animations all had a different 'feel' to them and a range of filming methods were used. The TED-style talks were very successful as many children surprised us at how confident they could be in front of an audience. It was also exciting to see these students giving each other constructive feedback and researching presenting tips as part of their journey. They really thought about what an effective talk would look and sound like. The group that were creating posters carrying environmental messages had less time available to them (as they were also in our gardening group), but still communicated some thoughtful ideas.

We hear the word 'self-manage' used a lot, but we know that everything that is involved in that (managing our time, resources, decisions, emotions, etc) takes ongoing development and practice. As evident in our most recent projects, it has been great to see the progress of individuals and the honest reflections everyone has made about successes, challenges, and the cause and effects of these.

Here are a few snippets from some presentations. See our individual portfolios and media galleries for more footage.

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.

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.

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.

Human Migration Projects

It was a satisfying day for many of us today, as we had the opportunity to share some of the literacy projects we have been working on that link with our migration inquiry.

Underneath our big idea - "Human migration is a response to challenges, risks and opportunities", we have been following on from our initial investigations into the causes of human migration, to look into real examples, specifically in the Pacific. 

The push and pull factors that brought our ancestors to Aotearoa

Our groups have been working on quite different projects. The Daredevils read about Maori sailing by starlight, so they wrote poetry about Maori exploring. They also created artwork to go with their poetry in a similar style to our Anzac art. 

The Daredevils' Maori exploration art

The Iron Men used Google Slides to work on a collaborative presentation where the boys each answered different questions about Polynesian discovery and the spread of various Polynesian cultures.

Both the Flashes and the Wonderwomen were retelling real stories that involved early settlement of New Zealand and the surrounding islands. 

Our sharing session today was a great way to reflect on our learning. For those retelling real stories, several of us had factual inaccuracies pointed out to us that we had included in our presentations. We will be revisiting how these happened in our groups. One of our next steps in researching as a class is to work on our referencing and sharing our sources of information (an area we really need to develop). 

Here are some snippets of today. Not only did the presenters do a great job, the audience did so well to listen carefully and to provide thoughtful feedback. Most of us have uploaded our projects to our digital portfolios.

The majority of the class chose Jacob's Explain Everything video as their standout presentation of the day, so here it is (Note: He is aware he muddled up a couple of facts!):

We will soon be learning about the effects that migration has both on people, and on places. Keep an eye on our Twitter and blog. 

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.

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.

Sharing Our Cricket World Cup Learning

We spent this morning sharing the Cricket World Cup projects that we've been working on for two weeks. Each of our literacy groups have had a different focus, which gave us a chance to teach our peers in the wider class about what we've been learning.

The cricket itself has been a great vehicle for us to develop a range of skills that will be useful for future inquiries. Some of these included…

• General research and the sorting of information we locate
• Independently using venn diagrams and other graphic organisers to display findings
• Deciding on the best type of graphs for purpose and creating these to share survey information
• All aspects of the video production process (including writing, filming and editing)
• Having input into project success criteria ("What will good look like for me?")
• Orally presenting our learning and responding to audience feedback

It's also been interesting to see many Room 14 children out with bat and ball in the playground this week. Matthew, Kyan and Izyah were courageous facing Mr Kinley today at lunchtime, whose right-arm off-spin could best be described as 'old school'.

Check out some photos from this morning.

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. 

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).

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?

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).

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.