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.

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.

What Does Our Class Size Data Tell Us?

We have successfully found the range, the median, the mode and the mean (average) of our class size data at Bromley School.

It has been insightful spending some time thinking together about what this information means. We were asked to spend some time analysing our findings and to answer the following questions:

1. What do we know? (What are the facts we can gather?)

2. What do we think we know? (Does the information imply other truths?)

3. What questions do we still have?

As you will see from some footage collected during our discussions, many questions have arisen that could drive further inquiries.

We are currently learning about migration and the movement of people from their countries of origin who have settled in other areas of the world, specifically New Zealand. This links with our overarching theme for the term, My Voice is Powerful, the essence of which is about culture and identity. Our new learning about statistical information will no doubt assist us gain a deeper understanding about diversity in Aotearoa.

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.

Getting Moving With Statistics

You may have seen a tweet of ours a few weeks ago about measuring our pulse. We were trying to find a way of calculating how many times our heart beats in a day. This led to some great discussions about what affects our heart rate and what an ideal heart rate is.

We found out that it's good to get your heart rate up and do some physical activity everyday. We learned that this can help us to think more clearly, focus and therefore achieve more in our learning. It was also interesting to find out that a lower heart rate when resting is often a sign of good health.

Our consensus was that we should try to integrate more fitness in our learning this term, which opened up some opportunities linking with our statistics focus.

Here are some of the activities we've been involved in over the last couple of weeks...