Being an Upstander

Over the past month, in our Cybersmart lessons we have been learning to be upstanders when we see things going wrong online and in person.

Some of the things we need to do to be upstanders can be hard, but we know that we can do this – especially if we use the skills we have learnt.

Over our lessons we have learnt about things like Scratch and Google Slides to make animations, Google Draw for posters and Google Slides to make pick-a-paths. We’ve also played interland to help us with making right decisions.

Whaea Stacey then gave us a task where we could choose the way we showed our learning from an online taskboard. Some of the things we could do were: videos, games, animations, podcasts or stories. We chose a variety of things. Here is some of our work.

From our class we had: 3 PE type games.
In one, we had to jump in a hoop with a person from the opposite team, the person who was fastest to say a compliment to the other person added a hoop to their line. The first team to run out of hoops was the winner.
In another, we put our football skills to the test by answering upstanding questions and passing the ball along our team if we got the questions right. After scoring a goal in football, we had to try and get a basketball shot up.
The third activity was an obstacle course and you couldn’t move onto the next part until you answered a question correctly.

We had lots of pick-a-paths and animations, as well as a kahoot!

4 people in our class became newscasters and interviewed other people.

We also had a few board games made, and some stories. One of the groups who wrote a story even took it to the younger students!

We also had a game which incorporated being an Upstander with learning Te Reo Māori!

Chrome Music Lab

Today in our Cybersmart lesson with Whaea Stacey, we followed on from our last session of copyright and creativity by learning about creating our own music through Chrome Music Lab. We were able to access different types of instruments and could change the rhythm as well. We needed to think about patterns in our music and what we could possibly use this with – background music for our animations we are also making seems like a good idea.

Have you tried Chrome Music Lab before? What would you use your music for?

We also learnt how to embed media, like some of our songs (please don’t change them) and our animations into our blog posts!

Creativity, Copyright & Free Use

Today in our ICF sessions, Whaea Stacey taught us about copyright and free use for images and music that we can use.

While most of us knew how to use remove.bg to remove backgrounds of images, it was a good reminder to us and a new concept learnt for everyone who didn’t. We then had to place ourselves in a picture. Can you find us?

 

 

 

 

 

We learnt to use the explore tool to find images, rather than going through google as well as how to attribute pictures to say who took the photo.

Some of us had some time to create badges for people.

Term 3 – Week 2 – AI

This week with our Cybersmart lesson, we learnt about AI. We discussed whether or not AI is good, and what we actually use it for!

We found out the recipe for the best chocolate cake ever (Whaea Stacey has said she will make it to see!)

We used canva and pxlr to create a range of AI generated pictures. Here are some of them!

Lots of us thought that we might use this in the future to help with our writing.

This was an awesome activity!

Week 8, Term 2

Ki ora, Welcome back to our blog! The rest of the class now has blogs, You can check out their blogs now!We have all finished our writing on renewable and some people on non renewable energy! We have posted it on seesaw and some have posted it on our blogs! What would you pick non- renewable energy or renewable energy?

 

This week we went skateboarding. They brought in a ramp for us to go over and we have improved a lot. We have one more skateboarding lesson tomorrow and we are all excited. What do you know about skateboarding? Have you ever skateboarded before? After all our lessons we get provided with free skateboards, helmets, kneepads and elbow pads! That’s cool Isn’t it?

 

 Next Thursday our renewable energy projects are due back which is exciting.What do you know about renewable energy? We have also been doing some mini projects at school like a car but the wheels are lollies, Picking all the chocolate chips out of a cookie. 

 

What have you been learning about lately?

 

By Molly

Week 7, Term 2

Kia ora,

Oops we have been a bit slack with our blogging lately! But the good news is, a few of our year 7s have been improving at getting some of their mahi and thinking blogged, so Miss Lock is stoked with that. Not long until our whole class will be blogging, and we are excited for this time!

Things have been pretty crazy at school with lots going on. Our skateboarding keeps getting stopped because of the rain. We can have sun all week then the rain ruins it for Friday. So hopefully we can catch up on our sessions at some point.

We are learning more about renewable energy, and even reading some cool texts about it, and writing about it! We are writing to persuade others about which type of energy we think is best. Most of us think renewable energy is, because it’s cleaner, cheaper in the long run and sustainable.

We have been doing some cool experiments with Mrs Flanagan to help us understand the different types of energy. Now we are working on projects at school and at home, to present in the last week of term.\

What is your favourite thing you are learning about this term?

 

24 hour footprint

We have been learning about our online footprint. We have learned that everything we share online can be searched, copied, shared, and is permanent. We learned this by watching a video and talking about what we’d seen; we also talked about times when we’ve shared something online and it’s been copied and shared without our permission. This is important information to learn because we have started our class blog, so we are actively sharing information online, during class time.

We collected screenshots of the places we visited online in the last 24 hours and inserted them onto our footprint. We also took a selfie to go with our footprint. We learned how to change the shape of our selfie by using Mask tool in Google Slides.

Here is a slidedeck of our footprints. We hope you enjoy looking through them.

Kuaka Tahi Week 3, Term 2

Kia ora koutou.

This week we have been finishing our Anzac tasks. It has been really interesting learning lots about why Anzac Day is important. Here are some pieces of persuasive writing we did on this topic. We are now very knowledgeable and passionate about Anzac Day. Please check out the writing and leave a comment.

Peyton’s writing

Isla’s writing

Jeffrey’s writing

On Thursday the weather was terrible and it rained most of the day. So we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to do skateboarding again on Friday. But lucky for us, the sky cleared up, and it was a stunning day on Friday. Our class walked round the corner to the skatepark, and all had a go at skateboarding. We will have to get some photos to share with you all another week, but if you follow our school Facebook page, there are some on there.

Have you ever tried skateboarding? If so, do you like it? We have 3 more lessons that we’re very excited about!

Week 2, Term 2, Kuaka Tahi

Kia ora, at Foxton Beach School we have had a lot of things. Some things we couldnt do like skateboarding. We have been working on our follow up for our teacher. Most of our work has been about ANZAC because if you didn’t know it was ANZAC day not long ago. 

On Friday we were meant to have skateboarding but it was canceled because of the weather. Skateboarding is a new thing for our school that our teachers want to do. It sounds pretty fun but we haven’t been able to try it out. We have had some sports going on like hockey, ki o rahi and basketball. The 5/6 have basketball every Thursday they go play in Levin. The 7/8 also have basketball but on Mondays. The year 7/8s has been doing art with Sonja Hart, the year 5/6 have just finished working with Sonja Hart so now it’s the year 7/8 turn. We have also been working on our ANZAC writing which is about why ANZAC Day is important. Do you guys honor or do anything on ANZAC Day?

Written by Keira and Peyton

Week 1, Term 2 in Kuaka Tahi

We were so excited to come to school this morning! Miss Lock surprised us by hanging up some special art in our room over the holidays. She also got a few new goodies like a huge tub of Lego, a 1,000 piece puzzle for us to do together, some seats that double up as storage boxes and a huge box of books for us to read. Some of us have already grabbed a few to take home and sink our teeth into!

But the most exciting part is we have our new principal. Her name is Mrs Katy Morresey. We had a very special Pōwhiri to welcome her. There were lots of guests, including her whānau and past students from her old school. We also had our local iwi Ngāti Raukawa supporting this Pōwhiri.

We are lucky to have a new student in our home class. Her name is Tina, and she has moved to us from Papatoetoe South School up in Auckland. We are excited to get to know her. She is half Māori, and half Tongan. We can’t wait to learn about her culture.

This term we have lots of sports coming up. At lunch, our year 5/6 basketball team had training, and we are pumped for our first game on Thursday. We have lots of class members playing netball this term, and some playing hockey too.

This afternoon, we did some ‘The Code’ spelling revision. It was really cool to see that we are remembering the rules we’ve learned in Term 1. Some of us even got cool stamps like Harry Potter or Ka Pai on our mahi.

We are ready for another busy term, and look forward to sharing what we get up to on here.

How was your first week back at school?