We are a collaborative learning space, with over 50 learners at Wainui Beach School in Gisborne. Our teachers are Kōkā Rozie, Kōkā Ngaire & Kōkā Pip.
We are so lucky to go to school right across the road from the beach...
Last Friday afternoon we skated, scootered and biked down to Koka Terri's whanau Pou about 2kms away from school. Koka Terri and Koka Ngaire biked too - Koka Terri rode her cool bike and Koka Ngaire got to borrow Koka Sue's awesome e-bike!
We learnt about the new pou from Koka Terri sharing what she knew and we had a look at the awesome design created and placed in to the concrete to wish everyone a safe journey on the new cycleway.
We loved getting out and about in our local environment - 50 of us in a line must have looked pretty impressive!!
Last Thursday MLH headed to the Tairawhiti Museum and the Electric Village for more learning to support our Retro Tech inquiry topic.
Half of us had a hands on time at the museum with old gadgets, while the other half of us headed to the Electric Village to find out more about electricity and where to in the future.
RETRO TECH @ THE MUSEUM We discussed what gadgets we knew about and looked at some from the museum archives - mostly around communicating: camera's, typewriters, quill pens, record players, gramophones etc. A couple of boys got stuck with a tape recorder. Have a giggle at the video of them trying to work out what it was and how it worked!
We then got to write our names with a quill pen and ink.... lots of practice needed! We were amazed that this is how so many people used to write. You certainly got messy fingers!
We had a look through Wyllie Cottage (the oldest European style house in the Gisborne area, built in 1872) where there were lots of kitchen gadgets were on display and some old fashioned games for us to play.
ELECTRIC VILLAGE This was really fun! We learnt about renewable and sustainable electricity resources and how & why e-transport is getting so big. We got to have a go on e-scooters (so cool!) and play with coding robots and a game that took a lot of concentration to not make a BUZZ sound!
We learnt about electric cars, bikes, scooters and even motorbikes! It made us think alot about our future because this stuff will be all around us soon... imagine when it will become Retro!!
Well, it has been a whole term since we last went down to Hamanatua Stream to weed and mulch around the native plants down there..... and the weeds are winning! Argh.
Today, we had to move a whole lot of mulch, but we had to weed around our natives first. We kind of got set up into a weeding team and a mulching team because that's just what needed to be done. We are learning a lot from Kauri Forno who worked hard with R1 last year. They have set the scene for us to follow this year.
We were pretty glad though to see that even though the fennel had got tall again, it was nowhere near the height it was when we first started! Back then, we couldn't really even see if there were natives anywhere amongst the fennel.
Some of the natives we are looking after are: flax, kawakawa, ngaio, whau and pohutukawa. We want them to grow big and strong. The weeding helps the plants to do this and the mulch keeps water in and the roots warm over winter.
MLH are committing to going down to our awa every second Friday this term to make sure we keep on top of all that fennel!! We hope that some community members will come along and help us out too. We will have to create some posters to encourage our community whanau and so that they are learning as well! It feels really good to share our knowledge and new learning of this important part of our school environment.
During the last week of Term 1, we had an influx of feijoa's, so Koka Ngaire thought it would be a fantastic idea to make Feijoa Icecream!
Heaps of kids went picking and bought in buckets of feijoa's, then another group of kids scooped out the feijoa pulp. We then had to add lemon juice and sugar to the pulp and that was left to set overnight. The next day we had some other learners who cracked eggs & seperated the yolk & whites, measured and whipped cream and folded it all together to create goodness!
This mixture was then left in the freezer overnight and then on Friday, last session, we enjoyed delicious feijoa icecream before heading off on our school holidays!!
Wow - we had a fantastic Think Tank session yesterday with our Retro Tech gadgets!!
In our groups we got the chance to have a VERY good look at our item - we shared together what our thoughts were about it (some people already knew what their item was - lucky!) and we knew that it didn't matter if everyone in our group had a different idea.
We used the 5Ws&H to help us get our thoughts down. We bounced ideas around in our groups, did some actual testing of our ideas, we asked questions of each other and justified our reasonings.
We only got our information from looking at our item - gaining more information from a wider source will come later.... We know that this is just the beginning of our learning for this term - we are looking forward to finding out more information about our items!!!
We revealed our schoolwide Inquiry topic yesterday.... it was very entertaining!
Our topic for this term is Retro Tech... learning about how technology of all varieties has changed for the better (or worse!)
Any ideas?
We will be working in our Buzz Groups and we started with "What's in the Box?". Kōkā Terri & Kōkā Ngaire had found lots of Retro gadgets and had hidden them in boxes to get our curiosity going.
Each buzz group got to choose one box and then we got to open the box in front of the whole class... most of the gadgets were known but there are 2 that noone has any idea what they are!!! We are going to create some responses in writing about our object and share them via advertisements.
If you have any ideas about the unknown items, we'd love a comment to help us out!
