Feeding Gratitude

As an example for the students of Room 9 to understand the concept of Installation Art I came up with my own idea for an installation piece, that was relevant to school life, and then enlisted their help with the organisation of it.
We created a piece of Installation in our student kitchen area that looked at the packaging and rubbish that was created by only
6 weeks of food that was given to the school through different schemes that was then free to the students. We looked at how much of it there is and if we valued it and were grateful for what it offered us and our families. We called it Feeding Gratitude. 


We stacked boxes, collected wrappers to put into buckets, bundled up lunch bags and fruit bags, washed out yoghurt and fruit pots, arranging it all in the area that was most relevant to the concept or idea, of the work. Then we counted and estimated the quantities of each item that is given to the school and created signs that could be hung from the ceiling. Our piece was ready for the school Art Festival and could be viewed along with all the students work.




At Waikowhai students can attend Breakfast Club. They also have access to food from a Kai Basket in the classroom and a daily fruit box. At lunchtime there are some lunches available for those who have none.  The main companies or organisations that provide these items are.......

Installation Artworks

 The Art Festival on Tuesday night was very successful. We used the previous Thinglink to let visitors know where our Installation Art pieces were and what they were about.  Below is a slideshow of pictures of the 13 pieces. As well as these works we also all had an Abstract Artwork in the festival as well. Our abstract work will be posted on our individual blogs this week.

                 

The students worked extremely hard on their pieces over many days. They developed excellent ideas about issues that are important to them; things in life they hate to see or are passionate about. I am very proud of the work they have produced.

Installation Thinkpieces

This term Room 9 have been working on installation art as part of our contribution to the bi-annual Art fair.  We have created pieces of installation art that are situated in and around teh senior school block.  Below you will see an interactive map created using thinglink that shows the location and explanation of these pieces of art.  We look forward to updating you with more photos of the work following the opening of the art festival.

Hope to see you here.

Fab Blog? Good Blog? OK Blog? Bad Blog?

Last week, with James our Cybersmart teacher, we looked at all the components that make a good blog comment; a comment that others will want to read again, consider and respond to. We were working on our Learn Create Share cycle in the session. We have learnt about blogging a few times since creating our own blogs, and so we could share ideas on the padlet below. The whole class created this padlet together. 



Then we looked at some comment examples and checked them against what we thought makes a good comment, and against a rubric for great commenting. Next it was time to write some good comments using the learning we had just completed. Before posting them, (or sharing) we checked each others work. 
We all work at different paces, so some of us can whiz through the three parts of the Learn Create Share Cycle. Others of us are challenged to fit all three parts of the cycle into the time we have, we have to stay focused and that's more learning too! 
BUT we all got great comments posted AND we shared our learning through a screenshot of our work and an explanation of what we did,  for our own individual bogs. 
You can check them out on the side panel of our class blog. 

Created with Padlet

RESPECT

At our school,  our core VALUE is …. RESPECT.

It comes with a

RESPECT CODE.

Four important areas

that we all need to

make sure we have

respect in.

This code tells us the best way of behaving all the time, with everyone that belongs to this school or visits
this school.

In Room 9 we have spent a lot of time looking at our goals for learning, behaving and using our chromebooks.

We were asked to think about the areas in the Respect Code that we needed to work on and write ourselves a Respect Goal to work on and to share at our assembly.

These were our ideas...

To make the most of our time at school it is important that we look after each other, work together and acknowledge our differences. 

Ms Southwell Leaves

Students arriving to school late, with an 'interesting' range of excuses,
that they delivered to Travis who played Ms Southwell. 

When told that our gorgeous receptionist was leaving our school after ten years of service, one student piped up "Wow! That's longer than I have been alive!"

Which put the time and effort Ms Southwell had put into our school into very clear perspective for the whole class.  We were given the task of organising her final farewell assembly, and the students were determined to give her the best of send offs.
Room 9 pulled together an amazing performance of small skits that highlighted some of the jobs and activities that Ms Southwell performed in her daily routine. Tasks that touched the lives of every student and adult in the school.

Ms Southwell, well loved. 

Singing Ms Southwell up to the front.

Max and Caroline giving her flowers. 

       

Mrs Petersen showing off the special book. 

Then she was asked to come and sit on a special chair on the stage where the school gave her flowers and a specially made book of many messages of love and care. After speeches the whole school sang her two very special songs, before heading home for the weekend.

We wish her well in her new job in the city and look forward to her visiting us.

A final farewell song and a salute to her dreams of a different future. 

Practise at Abstract Art

In Week Seven Waikowhai School will hold an Art Show. We are completing two art pieces for it. One will be an Abstract Artwork created from several different media on a large rectangular panel. We have spent several sessions playing with different shapes and media to understand what abstract art is. Some ideas we had around what Abstract Art is .... art that looks at how colour and shapes go together. It does NOT depict a person, place or thing. Instead it is about feelings and patterns and forms that make you WONDER what the artist is thinking about. Sometimes it might have clues to help you.  It can be painting or sculpture with any material or media.  
We have completed 8 different test pieces so far, to prepare for a final piece of artwork. We did them quite fast, with music and examples flicking through on a slideshow. The improvement in our quality of work as we have gone through the process is often really noticeable. We did 3 pieces in pastel, 2 pieces in crayon and dye, 1 in a mix of both and masking tape, 2 pieces in paint.
Below is a padlet of some of our work. We will put posts up on our individual blogs soon.

Created with Padlet

Music Knowledge

Room 9 has Music this term. The focus is on percussion after seeing the Strike performance last term. We will look at percussion that uses the human body, instruments and found objects. We will create and use sound cards to use when we put music to narrated story. A quick 3 minute challenge to get as many words we know about music into a shared padlet is a great way to use padlet, we find.

Created with Padlet

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu Introduction to Room Nine

This term we are sharing our learning and ideas with 3 other classes around New Zealand.  We are in a programme called Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu that creates blog groups. We are looking forward to seeing, reading and commenting on work these classes are doing and having them do the same for us. We will have an audience for our work, and practise writing comments that are meaningful to others. The other classes in our group are on the right hand side of our class blog. They are from Auckland, Paparoa and Paihia. 

Our class contains 26 Year 5 and 6 students and is in a school that geographically sits in the middle of Auckland City. We are a very cosmopolitan class that works really well together. Our overall theme for the year is Integrity and our School Value is Respect. These two attributes are important in our learning and personal journey's and are areas we continue to reflect on and talk about.
The following slideshow is a brief introduction to who we are......

Electricity and Circuits

Charlotte checking the plans and examples. 

Along with the two other classes in our syndicate, we spent Monday afternoon checking out Brain Box circuitry kits. Our focus this term continues to be Electricity with Integrity as the over arching theme. We will look into circuits and what the necessary components to make a circuit work are. Our target is to design and create a toy or gadget that has a circuit in it in some way!

Zoe looking at what needs to be connected. 

We had an excellent time collaborating with two other students from different classes. We also used our ipads to photograph each circuit we did so we can create thinglinks that discuss the relevance of each part in the circuit. The questioning, thinking, and conversations were awesome and no one really wanted to stop when the cars started rolling into the play ground, indicating 3 o'clock was close.   

Sifa enjoying getting the right links to get
his circuit to create sounds

Storm unpacking and labelling the different components. 

Caroline photographing the circuits they created. 

Hanging Fog and the Green wall Disappears

Fog hung over school all day in the last week of term. This was the school yard at 5pm in the evening. Students enjoyed playing in the eerie stillness.

Early one foggy Saturday morning a large yellow digger came in to remove the green wall on the edge of the court. Space was being made for the new classrooms to come in. Soon Rooms 7 and 8 and 9 will all be in one large ILE (Innovative Learning Environment) on the eastern boundary of the field. 

Video of some of the wall coming down. Dancing Digger. 

 By Izzy 

 Reading Slideshows 

By Joyce

Students have been reading novels in class and answered several different questions to create a slideshow about the book they were reading. These two girls are committed to their learning and have finished their work quickly.  Click on their names to link to their work.  They have both researched extra information on themes that are in the book Crown Park by Des Hunt,
a great New Zealand writer.


More slideshows will be shown on students independent blogs when Room 9 start to blog for
themselves. We have been working on Limelight by Tania Roxborough and Store Trek by Kate Foxlee

Poems about Camp

Muriwai Camp Acrostic Poems 

Acrostic poems are a great way to get all kinds of feelings, thoughts, experiences and opinions down for others to read. Using the different experiences we had we wrote poems about that topic. 

Anti- Bullying Week.

Anti- Bullying Week.

Caroline used a classic
stop symbol and cut some
of the lettering

Sadie used strong colour
and large font

Back in May we did lots of work around Anti-bullying. We designed t-shirts for our walls throughout the school. Here are some examples from Room 9. We thought about grabbing the viewer's attention with different elements like colour, font colour and size, illustrations, symbols or signs and phrases etc.

       

Benson used 3 colours all
with important meaning 

Charlotte used quotes from
Dr Seuss  that were relevant
to the message

We also read a book by Tim Tipene called Bullies and Warriors

Dora had an excellent set of responses to the book 

 
 
 

More Camp Pics

Muriwai Camp Fun Times Challenging Ourselves 

What an amazing bunch of girls we had on camp this year. They all got out there and had a blast, challenging
themselves and managing themselves with Integrity and Respect.