Room 18 Enviro News Episode 2

Episode 2 is Here!

Check out the latest episode of Room 18 Enviro News right here.  We are very proud to bring you another episode with lots of information about our new Sunnyhills Care Code.  Please remember to make a comment once you've watched it.  We love hearing about who has been watching our efforts and what they thought of them.  If you have any suggestions for future stories please add them to your comment too.

10 000 Vistiors!!

WOW look we've had 10 000 visitors to our blog!

I wonder who visitor number 10 000 was, it would have been someone that visited today.

Was it you?

Please make sure you make a comment on one or more of our posts when you visit.  We love hearing from our visitors.

We've been prototyping...

Prototyping

We're up to making meaning and connections with our inquiry.  This involves prototyping and getting feedback and feedforward from our potential users.

Here are a few photos of our adventures in prototyping today... 

We're going to keep working on our prototypes tomorrow so watch this space for a a few more updates.  Hopefully we'll get our inventions to a point where we'll be able to show you a solution to each of our problems. 

Coming soon....

We've been busy as usual in Room 18 producing another episode of Room 18 Enviro News, watch this space hopefully you'll seen the new episode in the next few days...

Here's a teaser trailer to watch while you're waiting..

Photo of the day

Pasindu is commenting on Brodie's solution to stop graffiti 🙂

Picture by Ben😐

How Might We...

This week we've finalised the problems we're trying to solve and worked on our first lot of solutions.  We're about to start prototyping our solutions.  Have you ever created a prototype before?  we watched this video that explained how Quirky creates prototypes using cardboard.  

These are the problems we're working to solve at the moment.

Each of us has created a storyboard with our first solution in it and we're gathering feedback from our classmates about that solution.  Some of us have thought carefully about the feedback we've received and we've started to create another even better solution already.  

Hopefully we'll have some prototypes to show you in the next few days so watch this space... 

A Measuring Problem

Today the triangles maths group looked carefully at a measurement problem.   This problem came from the NZMaths website... 

We made our own metre rulers using our 30cm classroom rulers to help us.  We noticed that our rulers weren't quite the right length.  We discovered that we needed to add three strips plus a bit more to get to a metre.  We talked about how 100cm is the same as 1 metre.  

Then Mrs Lee challenged us to think about how many strips we might need to make different lengths of rulers.  We had to think about what other knowledge we could use to help us to work this out.  Some of us worked out that our three times table was very useful for solving these problems.  We also worked out that we could use the answer to a previous problem to help us to work out the answer to the next problem. 

There was lots of talking about how we reached our answer for each problem and what might be an easier to way to get the answer for the next problem.  

Maths Week

Last week was maths week.  During the course of the week we competed in the Matific Games and some of us completed the Maths Week Daily Dollar questions.  

Screenshot from Maths Week Website https://www.mathsweek.co.nz/

We made a guesstimate on the number of lollies in Ms Madden's window but unfortunately we didn't have the closest guess.  We used a Google form to make our guesses and ended up with an average of 179.5 lollies.   Here is the graph that shows all our guesses... 

During the week we had a leaderboard that showed how many dollars we'd earned for completing Matific assignments and the maths week Daily Dollar questions.  Our final leaderboard looked like this... 

Once we had our total dollars we were allowed to buy an activity to complete this week.  We were allowed to combine our dollars so we could buy more activities.  With our dollars combined we managed to have enough to buy a virtual reality experience, a board game challenge and filming episode 2 of Room 18 Enviro news.    Unfortunately there are only so many days in the week and hours in a day so we'll have to save the Art/Craft and Maker Challenge and Mystery Hangout for another time. 

Photo of the day

Poppy was doing math and working out problems

Photo taken by Chantelle

Dumpling Making

Today we made DUMPLINGS! We also ate them. Inside it had sweet corn and carrots. They were delicious.

To make dumplings you need:
Vegetables - sweet corn and carrots
Dumpling wrappers
A pot to boil them in

Instructions for making dumplings:
1. You get the dumpling wrapper
2. You put a small portion of vegetables in the wrapper
3. You hold the wrapper and fold it in half and squeeze the ends together
4. Put the dumplings in the pot and cook them
5.  It's done.

Photos taken by Jessie and Jiaqi

Post Written by Danya, Jessie and Brodie

Photo of the day

Sonia doing her writing work.

By Ruby

Photo of the day

We have been doing string art, first we put paint on a string, then

we folded a peace of paper, we made a S shape on our paper with the string

then we folded it over so it could cover it lastly we put a magazine on the paper and pulled the 

string out and it made peace of art.   

Photo Taken By Erin

Room 18 Enviro News - Episode 1

Here it is hot off the press.... our first attempt at creating our own Enviro News show.  We worked hard to create our own graphics and do all the recording and reporting ourselves.  Next time we might be able to make our own music, for now Mrs Lee helped us chose a few tracks from iMovie to go with our broadcast. 

We would love to hear your feedback on our first episode, please make a comment and let us know what you thought.

Photo of the Day

Chess and International helpers 

Photo by Danya

Something special is in the works...

On Tuesday this week we voted on creating something a little different in our classroom... here's a few hints... more details to come soon... I wonder what Room 18 have been up to?

Check our blog tomorrow to find out....

Our Blog Statistics

We've been tracking our blog statistics, we try to track them each day but some days we don't quite get it finished.  Here are the days we've tracked so far.   Each week we'll post an update on how our blog is doing.  

Can you help us to improve our statistics?

Do you know someone who might want to read our blog? 

Please send them the link to our blog, we love getting more readers.

Can you write a comment on one or more of our posts?  

Comments let us know who is reading our blog and what they think of our posts.  We'd love to hear about your reactions to our posts

Photo of the day

This picture is of the Dolphins group reading. I chose this photo because they were reading beautifully.  Photo is taken by Pasindu

Photo of the day

This photo is about Poppy doing Tinker Time. I chose it because she was working hard.
Photo taken by Zoey.

Our Tread Lightly Experience

Yesterday we visited the Tread Lightly Caravan and participated in a activities in the hall.  There were so many great things that we discovered here are just a few of them... 

• Bees, especially honey bees are extremely important to our plants if we don't have bees our plants will die out because bees pollinate our plants 
• Generating power for iridescent lightbulbs takes a lot of work.  It is much easier to generate power for an LED bulb because it requires a lot less power.  
• Our storm water drains lead directly to the sea, that means we have to be very careful about what ends up in them.  Sea creatures mistake much of the rubbish that ends up in our oceans as food and it can make them very sick
• Rubbish that goes to the landfill can stay around for a long time, we discovered the a cell phone we throw out today will look almost the same 100 years later - just a bit dirtier if it is thrown into a landfill 

Mrs Lee took a few photos while we were participating in each activity, take a look at all the awesome things we discovered... 

During our Tread Lightly experience we chose a pledge for the environment.  We're going to work on fulfilling our pledges over the next four weeks.  Here are the pledges we chose.. 

Tinkering at Tinker Time

On Tuesday we had a bit of Tinker Time.  We chose something we'd like to Tinker with from six different stations Mrs Lee had set up around our classroom. 

We were able to chose from...  
- Mystery Bag
- Building Challenge
- Makey Makey 
- Hour of Code - Minecraft Edition 
- Magazine Creations 
- Citizenship Badge

Tinker time is all about giving things a go, and you guessed it Tinkering.  Mrs Lee gave us a starting point, where we chose to take a challenge, badge or provocation was up to us.  Our only rule was we needed to keep calm and try things out.

Room 18 are pretty amazing at tinkering.. here are a few photos of us hard at work ... 

As part of our Tinkering Mrs Lee challenged us to take screenshots and photos of the process we were going through while Tinkering.  We're going to use these screenshots and photos to create a screen cast tomorrow.  We'll be using a great tool called Screencastify.  This is another way we can Share and Shine.  When we've had a few goes at using Screencastify we'll share some of our screencasts with you so watch this space... 

More Problems

Whoops Mrs Lee forgot to publish this post earlier... 

Last week we went on a problem walk around our classroom and around the school.  We were looking for problems.   While we were walking around we paused to write down any problems we could see, big, small, easy, hard - anything we thought might be a problem was added to our list.  Before we thought about problems we had worked on what inventions were and how we might change them to make them better.  

We have started looking closely at the problems we found today and the problems we have already added to our Problem Padlet.  We are still looking for even more problems so feel free to add a few problems you have to our problem Padlet below.  Remember our Padlet is moderated to your problems won't show up straight away.

We have also started to narrow down our problems by adding them to a problem diamond.  This is one of the ideas presented as part of the Google Science Fair projects.  It helps to bring out the problem we're most interested in solving.  We are choosing problems that we don't already have a solution for.   Here are some photos of the work we've completed around our problems... 

Photo of the day

Jessie showing us the right way to use bins. We did an activity on sorting the right rubbish into the right bins including are new soft plastic one!

Photo taken by Jessica

Catching up on Photo of the Day

We've been a bit behind with our Photo of the day this week so we have two photos this morning... 

Photo Taken by Jiaqi

Tinker Time  creating snowflakes

Photo Taken by Carolyn

Working on our problem diamonds to find out what problem we're going to solve.