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 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". ...