Robotics Fun: Our Lunchtime Club with Imagination Station!

We’ve had a fantastic initiative that’s running at our school: a lunchtime Robotics Club for 12 of our Year 3 students. This club has been a huge hit, thanks to the fantastic Debbie from Imagination Station, who secured funding from GCSN to get it off the ground.

In Term 2, Debbie has been leading these sessions, and it’s been incredible to see the students’ engagement and learning. Each week, our Year 3 students have worked with a buddy to build and code various challenges using LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Essential kits. The focus has been on hands-on problem-solving, teamwork, and developing foundational coding skills in a fun and interactive environment.

Elizabeth will be taking over the club for Terms 3 and 4, building on the fantastic foundation Debbie has laid. Elizabeth is looking forward to continuing this journey of discovery and innovation with our young engineers!

What Our Robotics Enthusiasts Thought!

  • I enjoyed the building aspect, especially the mini-golf challenge. I liked working with the base plates and motors to create the hitting mechanism for the ball. I did find the programming hard because it didn’t make sense at times.  Nehemiah
  • ‘I loved it so much!” and it was “super fun” and I enjoyed building the helicopter. Josiah
  • I loved the building side of things and using LEGO. The colour sensor was a challenge to work with. Ashley
  • Both Jai and Eli liked working with a friend, having a buddy to build with and enjoyed making the boat.
  • I found it fun to see what other people were building and seeing how they built with a buddy.  My buddy and I created a mini golf game and used a colour sensor to detect the colours of the pinballs.

We are so grateful to Debbie and GCSN for making this enriching experience possible for our students. We can’t wait to see what amazing robots and projects our Year 3s will create in Terms 3 and 4!

A Fun Morning in Ata Hāpara

This morning, when the Cool Rise Team (CRT team) visited Ata Hāpara, the Tui group (Years 3 and 4 ) worked with Whaea Kathy for the morning.

Tamariki had lots of fun solving challenges with the multilink cubes. They worked together, helping each other and sharing ideas.

.

After the break, we listened to a story called The Seven Kites of Matariki, then tamariki decorated and created their own paper Matariki kite. We tested the kites outside and they flew surprisingly well.

Gymnastics

This week we were lucky enough to have our first of 3 gymnastics sessions at QE2! The tamariki learned lots of new skills to help with strength and balance. Tau kē tamariki mā.

 

Week 1 2025!

This week the teina spent lots of time reading about what a treaty is and then we formed our own classroom treaty. We discussed as a whole class what we thought our rules and promises could be, and once we all agreed we then made hand print signatures to sign our class treaty. Well done tamariki mā!

He Waiata Whakatauki

We were very lucky to have Sean O’conor from Ngati Porou visit our kura this week to share some waiata whakatauki with us. We learnt the meaning behind all the kupu in the waiata and then sang together as a whole akomanga, while some lucky volunteers got to play the ukulele and xylophone for us. He reka hoki te waiata a ngā tamariki! Click the link to hear some sweet tunes. IMG_3185

 

Line Dancing

This week our tautoru me tauwhā were given to opportunity to lean some line dancing with the tauwhā from Tāne Mahuta. Whaea Fi taught us a whole routine, then we practiced the routine to different waiata at various speeds. Our favourite moves were the k step and the grape vine. We are very excited about our next lesson.

Ngā mihi nunui ki a koe Whaea Fi!

 

Active Travel

Here is a throwback to when we did active travel at school. Our ākonga learnt about the give way rules and got to practise putting these into action on our pump track. Some akonga were in cardboard cars, some were on scooters, bikes and we had pedestrians  using the pedestrian crossing. We also revisited the stop, look and listen rule for crossing roads safely on the way to and from school. He rawe tau mahi koutou!

Delicious Treats

Tautoru me tauwhā have been learning about procedural text. We wrote out the process for making fairy bread and home made up and go.

We then had to follow our process to make them. This was a super fun way to test out our sequence and to check that we are using the correct precise actions words.

Check out some of our creations.

Week 2 Science

We have continued learning about changes of state this week through an ice block experiment. Our ākonga have had fun describing the changes of state from the powder at the start which was a solid, to the liquid form once we added water and dissolved the powder, we then froze the ice blocks which turned them back into solid, and last but definitely not least, the ice blocks were turned back into liquid once we ate them!

 

Week 1 Science

This week we had our first round of science experiments to spark interest in the awesome concepts that we will be diving into this term. Here we have some rōpū who were watching how things can change states from a solid to a liquid. We did this using bath bombs as our mystery item which tamariki enjoyed watching dissolve, bubble and fizz into a liquid state. Our ākonga then came up with questions about why that happened. They then got to make the next batch of bath bombs to get an idea of what goes into them and how water can activate the change. Watch this space for more fun experiments to come!