Procedural Writing: Sandwich Making for Lunch

Methanex Mathematics Competition 2014

Last night in New Plymouth Auroa Primary School competed in the 2014 Methanex Mathematics Competition Quiz.   We had two teams competing in the Y7 and Y8 section.   The Y7 team consisted of Meg, Kaiah and Keifer from Room One and Joe from Room Two.  The team were running second for parts of the competition, before finishing 10th out of 22 teams.  You can read Kaiah recount about the event on her blog here.

Following this competition the Y8 team then took up the challenge.  The Y8 team consisted of Thomas, Tom, Izzy and Michael.  The team managed to finish tenth in the competition, out of twenty nine teams.

Special mention must go to Mr Gibson and Mr Bloor who stepped up for the parents team in the Y7 competition, who were runners up against an amazing Devon Intermediate team.

Wanganui Robocup 2014 Results

Today, on Saturday 27th June seven teams from Auroa Primary School travelled to Wanganui Intermediate School to take part in the regionals for the 2014 Junior Robocup.  The teams were competing in the 'Dance Theatre' section of the competition.

Winning the competition were Tom, Lucas and Michael, the Robos, who also had a member unable to attend (James).  The runners up, and winners of the peoples choice award were Emily, Alice and Izzy, the Poi Princesses.  Third place went to the Udder Bludders and a highly commended went to the Country Boyz.   While not everyone was lucky to attend the event we made sure that we recorded images and film from today, which we will be posting online in the coming days.

RoboCup2014 - Video Maker

4,000 Individual Students hits... and amazing work...

This week we've had two students from Room One, Auroa Primary School have over 4,000 hits on their individual student blogs. Izzy reached the mark slightly ahead of Emily. All of our students have done an amazing job with their students blogs which have been created for the first time for our school.

Next term one of our major events is a Digital Awards for our Moa Cluster which includes Auroa Primary School, Matapu Primary School and Opunake Primary School.    There are an entire raft of awards that will be competed for, one of these is for digital photography, Emily from Room One, whose blog is Emily's E-mazing Smarticles has just published a slideshow of some of her photography.  Its a stunning piece of work that can be viewed by clicking on the link here.

Royal School of Dunkeld

Recently we've been looking to help a classroom of students, Primary 4, from the Royal School of Dunkeld in Scotland.   They sent us a wonderful video with some questions for us in New Zealand as they are studying Commonwealth Countries.   We viewed their video in class this morning and brainstormed about how we could respond.  As they are a Primary 4 class we decided to get some of our students from Room Eight, our Y1 class to answer on our behalf.  This video was filmed today by Izzy, Gemma and Alice.
Video for Royal School of Dunkeld in Scotland from Myles Webb on Vimeo.
At the twenty second mark of our video you can glimpse in the background Mount Taranaki which is the most famous landmark in our area.  We also have a number of students looking at producing presentations about Scotland which will be be posting soon.

Auroa Primary School: Educreations to Show Mathematics Strategy

In class for Mathematics we've been looking at using tools to explain strategies.  One of the tools that our students have been using is Educreations which is available as an App for Ipad.   These students have created these explanations about strategies to solve problems.  They've worked out a problem, worked on creating an explanation of the strategy and then recorded the strategy.  This is from Tahana who is explaining how to solve problems by doubling and halving. Isabelle from Room Ones Question was: How many hours are in a year? She worked out the answer using strategy and explains her answer as follows: The final example is from Meg. Meg question uses rounding to solve the problem 39 multiplied by 80.

Barefoot at School In Auroa, New Zealand

As part of the #2014gbc (Global Blogging Challenge) we've been asked to create a lesson this week for our global audience.   Yesterday in class the students had to plan a film which was targeted at being between thirty and forty five seconds in length, taught a lesson and reflected something that was unique to New Zealand.   The video was created by Emily, Izzy and Gemma and came about from a comment we've had about our students in New Zealand having bare feet at school.   Planning and storyboarding took place yesterday afternoon and this morning.  The students also fully edited the project and produced it themselves.

Bare Feet #gbc from Myles Webb on Vimeo.