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.

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).

Community Clothing Sale - Update

We've been meaning to post a bit of the footage from our community clothing sale at the end of last term. Thank you to everyone who donated. A portion of the profits have been given to each of the senior school classes for enhancing their physical environment in some way.

All Room 14 children contributed their ideas on a wiki page we created online. After much discussion in class, the money we received was used to buy some lanterns and new book storage units.

Geometry - Position and Orientation

We have a focus on geometry this term. If you've been following our Twitter, you would have noticed the work we have been doing with shapes.

This week we've been looking at position and orientation. Today we discussed times in our lives when we have used maps. When talking about travel maps in particular, we highlighted the grid patterns we often see and how these help us to pinpoint specific locations.

Our challenge today was to set up a scene (using toy animals from the junior school, maths equipment and other items we could find) and write a description so that others could try and recreate our scene.

We needed to use the co-ordinates as well as compass directions in our descriptions. This video has a few snippets of our work this morning.


What would happen if we wrote instructions for the reader to rearrange the pieces? Would that change the language we might use? What new knowledge might we need?

Time - Filling In The Gaps

This term we've looked at several types of measurement. In many ways, improving our knowledge of measurement has helped us to gain a better understanding of our inquiry investigations.

One thing we know we can measure is 'time'. However, with some honest discussion we've found that some of us really struggle to tell the time, while a large number of children have no problem with it at all. This is before we've undertaken many specifically 'time-related' maths investigations this year.

While we had a multi-strand problem solving challenge set up this morning for most children, we also had a couple of special groups running. These groups were run by individual children who considered themselves 'time experts'. Any children who felt they needed to fill in some knowledge gaps and had some questions they wanted answering were able to 'drop-in' to these special groups.

Judging by our conversations afterwards, the groups were valuable to those children who opted in to them. Some interesting questions were raised that could lead into great inquiries alone (e.g. "Why don't we just have ten hour days?" - It would make things easier, wouldn't it?).

Learner response: How does being able to tell the time enable you as a learner?

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.

Technology Challenge: Aircraft

With our cricket team away and various other activities happening on Friday afternoon, a small group of us undertook a technology challenge.

The focus for this was around teamwork. Before we started, we discussed questions like, "What happens if you have different ideas to your peers?", "How do I get people to listen to my ideas?" and "What is the difference between showing leadership and being bossy?"

Although we would have liked more time to work on our designs (as the time limit was a bit short), we thought we worked well in our teams, as you can see in some footage of the task. Excuse the sound of workmen and their chainsaws cutting back some trees in the background...

Traits Of A Great Learner - What Do We Think?

We often speak about the characteristics of great learners. Especially as we evaluate and reflect on each week, recording our weekly highlights and challenges, as well as determining how well we managed our learning on a self-management scale. But what are we working towards? Do we really know the skills and attitudes we require to be great learners? This activity gave us a clearer perspective on the traits we collectively value.

First, we had a think-pair-share about the positive traits we believe great learners have. After sharing our ideas, we looked back on our blog to see what Room 14's class of 2013 said in a similar activity. Then we each wrote down 3 of the traits that we thought were most valuable to a learner and put our lists in a box.

Here is a word cloud showing the results. Traits appear larger the more times they were written in the box...

This graphic will be on display in our classroom and will help with our weekly goal setting and evaluations.

Where Do We Have Family Heritage?

We have created this display showing a few of the countries where we have family heritage. We will be getting visitors to our class to add to this. We are already beginning to show a very diverse community, even within our classroom! It will be interesting to see what happens to this display by the end of the term...

Steps To Success - Term One

Each term, we will be identifying one skill and one attitude that we will be looking to master in order to make some big steps to success as learners.

These are different to our weekly goals, which are more 'baby steps' you could say, as they have a short-term focus and can be evaluated every Friday. The goals we came up with today are more significant. We had time to think carefully and then discuss ideas with our peers, making sure that our goals are appropriate and challenging.

Here are some of the goals we have come up with this morning...

What Makes A Person Unique?

We've been discussing this question. First, we needed to come up with a definition of 'unique'.
Cassius said it meant - "better than fantastic". Ellee thought it meant - "what makes us different".

After some discussion, and Mr K giving some examples, we wrote on the whiteboard
- "Like no other".

We wondered about all of the things about a person that add up to make them unique.

Individually, we wrote a list of these things. Lots of ideas were shared, like 'language' (Matthew), 'food we eat' (Kyan), 'our interests' (Erin), 'abilities' (Logan), 'where our parents are from' (Blayde), and many more...

These ideas will help us begin to understand about the diverse culture and identities within our community (and the wider world). We have already been communicating aspects of our own culture when working on our mihi with Mrs Tudor. Next week we will be researching some countries competing in the Winter Olympics, linking with our statistics focus, and investigating the different cultures, languages and heritages that exist around the world.

Exploring Learning Environments

This morning we have been exploring great learning environments, leading into the vision we are creating this week for our own classroom.

We have been sharing stories about positive and negative learning experiences we have had in the past. This year we have at least one child from each of the senior syndicate classes last year, so we can listen to lots of experiences.

We imagined a classroom where lots of great learning is taking place. What would we see? What would we hear? What would the teacher be doing?

With these questions in mind, we worked in groups to come up with ideas. Many ideas were later shared with the whole group, some of which were peacefully debated. The noise level was one of these. Should a classroom be a very quiet place, or does discussion help us in our learning?

A great session sharing opinions and experiences…