Kereru Stirfry challenge - card sculptures and building

The stir fry challenge!

On the 13th of May 2016 the Kereru syndicate had a challenge group and we had tons of fun. We were split into random groups that was about the size of a class and had fun making buildings of playing cards. Each group was surprised how well and high they built their houses of cards, but some people were a little disappointed that their card forts fell. Even though it was hard, the groups stayed on track and kept on going even if it got really hard. Next time we all hope we do better when we build the forts and that they don’t fall as much as last time. B-)           

By Ben and Angus


Notes from Mrs Wilson

Why did we call it stirfry challenge?
One of things we like to do is mix all the Year 5-6 students up and have them working with others that are not in their class. So metaphorically we stirred up all of their names and made 5 new groups. Fry - because we do the group on a Friday. Challenge - each week the students get a different challenge. Each group in our five classes does the same challenge at the same time.

What was the challenge with the cards?
Students were challenged to make the 'best' structure with about half a pack of cards. As a group of 3-5 they had to agree on what their criteria for 'best' was eg biggest, strongest etc.

How does this link to the curriculum, isn't it just playing?
The NZ Curriculum has the five key competences that weave through all curriculum learning. They are

• Relating to others.
• Managing self.
• Participating and contributing.
• Thinking.
• Using languages, symbols and text

With the card challenge we focused on participating and contributing to their groups creation and managing themselves as individuals and as a group.

The second week the groups met they used blocks and a range of other equipment. They had challenges like

• build something that only has one long skinny block as the bass
• build something that has the cups in the middle
• build something that has things sticking out and the cups are balancing on the sticky out things.

Calla's star student teaching

Angry birds competition in real life

Campbell found a competition in an Upstart magazine. He had the brilliant idea for a group of Room 18 students to make an angry birds level to try and win us a class trip to the Angry Birds movie and to have Bomb and Red (two angry bird characters) come and visit the school.

More than half of the class was really keen. They made the bad piggies themselves. They used the boxes from the library.

They had heaps of fun building, making and launching angry birds, bad piggies and the level.

Here are the results.

To Upstart mag

We have chosen to do this competition because we like playing and watching angry birds.

We have had some teams for pigs and birds. The pigs made the level and the birds made the angry birds.

We did this level because it was strong and stable. It took about an hour to do the angry birds.

I enjoyed making the angry birds because I was hanging out with my friends. At our school we have lots of boxes so we used them and the homemade pigs. We were surprised that we did it so fast. We are all really excited.

From Redwood School Room 18 (Eddie)

Reading genre posters

We are spending a few weeks learning more about different genre (styles) of books and finding examples of these in the library. We will also be reading different genre to help us find some new books to read independently.

We started by brainstorming what genre we knew. In pairs or threes we made and presented a poster about one genre. We had instructions to follow. Some groups followed the instructions better than others. But we all got our posters made.

Star Student teaching - Campbell & Eddie

We've loved having different students teach us things. Here are two of our favourites.

At the end of Term 1 Campbell, his Mum and sister brought in all the ingredients for us to make his famous cold chocolate drinks. There were very tasty and a fantastic way to finish the term.

Eddie and a few of the other boys are awesome hip hop dancers. They taught us one of the dances they know. Mrs Wilson was very impressed with how fast the class learnt the moves. This video shows some of the students performing.