Koru 2 Bromley School

Koru 2 is well into their Grow Waitaha, Digi Awards journey. This year the theme for the Digi Awards is based on the whakatauki:  Ahakoa he iti, he pounamu–Although it is small, it is precious.  First, we discussed what that might mean to us as a class. The main idea that came out of the discussion was that we could have a positive impact on our community by creating something simple. But what? Meanwhile, Mrs Harris had been having some conversations in the staff room. Here's a video breaking down a problem some of the teachers are having: Our next step was to begin empathizing with this problem and ideating - generating some ideas on how it could be solved. Our big project idea is to build a website resource for teachers. The site will be filled with videos that provoke a certain positive emotion or feeling, for example, calm or focused. The teachers will be able to access these videos for their classes when needed. Some of us even want to create videos for the teachers that ...

On Tuesday we painted our clay birds. It was fun experimenting with and mixing colours to create the correct tones for the wings and other features of our birds. Today we brought our birds to life. We used Keynote to sketch the habitat of our bird. Then we used the green screen to photograph our bird and add instant alpha. Next, we used the animation feature on Keynote to bring our birds to life. We needed to use our computational thinking skills to organise the correct animation commands on keynote. Here are some examples and you can check out everyone's animation on Seesaw.

After a long break from school due to lockdown, we've revisited our Creative and Native inquiry. Last term, we wanted to make clay sculptures of our birds for the planned school art exhibition, however, that couldn't go ahead for obvious reasons. We decided we still wanted to make our sculptures so we needed to do some planning for this. Mrs Harris shared some helpful videos with us about clay bird sculpturing. We used our topic books to plan out each step. We needed to look closely at our birds and take notice of their features. Today we set up our classroom for clay sculpturing. It felt like an art studio while we all molded, scraped, smoothed, and shaped our NZ native birds. Some of us ran into some challenges but we had a can-do attitude and found solutions. We are looking forward to painting our birds when the clay dries out.

We have started a new inquiry called Creative and Native. So what's this all about? With an inquiry, we have a general theme that can take on many different learning journies. We never really know where we will end up because we tap into our curiosity along the way. Sometimes our wonderings take us in a different direction. So far here's what has happened. To begin we were asked what native means. Some of us had a bit of an idea and we were curious to learn more. Mrs Harris told us we would become ornithologists - bird scientists. We were given some interesting websites and asked to have a browse. We all chose a NZ Native Bird that appealed to us. Our next step was to become an expert on this bird. Some inquiry questions were: - What are the features of your bird? - What is your bird's habitat and whereabouts in Aotearoa can it be seen living in the wild? - What does your bird eat? - Is your bird endangered and does it have any predators? We found out some amazin...

In Koru 2 we have been developing our emotional intelligence and resilience. We call this learning time Taha Hinengaro.  Taha hinengaro  is your mind, heart, conscience, thoughts, and feelings. It's about how you feel, as well as how you communicate and think.   First, we learned about some important parts of our brain the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. We learned what role they play in our emotions and actions. We have been participating in a variety of fitness activities to help us practice resilience. At times we can get frustrated and competitive during the game. Afterward, we reflect on how well we managed our reactions. Did we let our amygdala block our prefrontal cortex from having a mindful response? Sometimes we did but other times we used some strategies to help us like: Irakehu - "I walk away". Keita - "I walk away and I find somewhere to relax". Paige - "My mindful jar calms me down". Hanlin - "Sometimes I can take so...

We have just finished our first novel study of the year. Our book, titled The One and Only Ivan was about a mighty Silverback Gorilla who lives in captivity in a shopping mall in America. Ivan is a wonderful friend to the other animals and his mission is to help set free a baby elephant named Ruby. The novel has taught us about empathy and friendship. We have linked our guided reading groups to the novel by reading non-fiction about Gorillas and other mammals. During literacy time we managed ourselves by selecting tasks off the Ivan task board below. We managed ourselves by keeping track of our progress, working well in small groups, staying on task and completing our tasks on time. If you want to see some of our amazing outcomes check out our Seesaw accounts. Here are some of our thoughts about the novel. Hanlin - "It was amazing it was really good because I'm into animals and it was a really good ending because Ivan found what he was looking for Ruby". ...