The Power of Minecraft

Today I had an IEP and a parent said to me "My son read a poster on a window the other day, when I asked him how he learnt those words, he said Minecraft" I did a silent cheer of success!

Minecraft for me has gone from digging holes and creating havoc to a educational driven passion.
I am excited about the range of learning opportunities this tool provides. I am not going to call it a 'game' because for me and my class it is so much more!

I decided to undertake my own inquiry last year. I had a year 7/8 class with around 50% being keen Minecrafters and 10% experts. By the end of the year I could say I had 95% keen Minecrafters and 50% experts.

This year at week 3 I have already got 5 or 6 students bursting at the seams to get cracking (after all they heard about my class last year).

I can't wait to play around and discover more ways I can incorporate this into learning programme. I am just waiting for some light bulb moment or lightning bolt of inspiration to set me off!

Teaching Our Pepeha

At the start of this year our staff went on a PD day to our local Marae. Once we there we talked about connecting our students to the local area through our school pepeha. It was great for us as staff to learn our pepeha and have it broken down. It was broken down into meaning of the words and understanding of each of the locations and their significance to our school and students. 

Our Pepeha:

Ko Whakapoungakau te pae maunga

Ko Pukepoto te tihi

Ko Waingaehe te awa

Ko te Rotoruanui-a-Kahumata-momoe

Ko Mokoia te Motutapu-a-Tinirau

Ko Puketawhero te papawhenua

Ko Whakaue te iwi

Ko Roro-o-terangi te hapu

Ko Mokoia te kura

Tihei mauriora

One of our teachers taught this to the students' during our camp rotation. She taught it to the students line by line. She started with our maunga and showed the students what it was, where it was and broke down the meaning of the word 'Whakapoungakau'. She then told the students to draw a mountain range on their paper and label it. She did this line by line until the students had a piece of art that reflected our pepeha. What I love most about this is the work my students came back with was all different based upon their interpretation and the way they visualized each feature. 

Interactive Journals

This year I decided to utilise three new resources I had purchased late last year. My goal was to engage my students and turn what I considered the boring stuff into fun and informative. I knew I needed a way to collect evidence of their learning, but didn't want to create more work for myself and bore my students. So far they have been a great success. They are engaging, relevant and make learning the basics fun!

Interactive Math Journal

Interactive Reading Journal

Interactive Writing Journal

Interactive Maths Journal:

I began these last year with my class towards the end of term three. It is the resource I recommend and show off the most to my colleagues. You teach a lesson on a skill, students create an interactive manipulative and then they show their own evidence of learning. I am excited to add regular entries to their journals. They will be able to take these with them to high school or keep them at home to remind them of the concepts they have learnt throughout the year. This year we have set up the journals with their title pages, table of contents, evidence of learning criteria and then their first entry (2014 goal setting). 

Interactive Reading Journal:

In our class this year we have been studying the novel 'Wonder'.  I wanted a way to teach reading skills to the whole class that I could then touch on during guided reading rotations and during our novel study time. Our first entry was on 'Internal Vs. External Conflict'. We created the interactive manipulative and recorded down the information. We then looked at two YouTube clips from 'Toy Story 3' that showed internal and external conflict. This helped my students to create their own links to the concept. To consolidate this we read 'The Stone' by Lloyd Alexander. It is a short story that my class loved! They highlighted the internal and external conflict that occurred in the story and recorded this down as their evidence of understanding. 

We touched on this the next day during our literacy circle and then looked at types of conflict. We looked at:

- Man Vs. Man (External)

- Man Vs. Nature (External)

- Man Vs. Society (External)

- Man Vs. Self (Internal)

This was harder concept for the students to grasp but after the activities they showed a deeper understanding. We created the interactive manipulative and once again recorded down our information. The students then cut out a number of scenarios and placed them under the headings they thought fit. We then discussed each scenario and how they fit into the appropriate category. Our next entry will be on story devices (flashback, suspense, cliffhanger and foreshadowing).

Interactive Writing Journal:

We have only just begun our writing journals. When I looked at our writing samples I noticed that my students needed a deeper understanding of literacy devices, grammar and strategies to self assess and improve their own writing. We have completed our first entry on 'Dead Words'. We discussed words we want to 'bury' from our writing during our literacy circle. We talked about overusing adjectives and being lazy with our vocabulary. Their writing journals will be used as a guide to improve their writing and to teach them sentence structures, paragraphing and the correct formats for the different genres of writing. 

Overall I think our Interactive Journals have been a huge success. My students are excited to add to them and the concepts we are covering are relevant and purposeful to our learning. 

Wonder Novel Study

In class this term we are looking at the novel 'Wonder'. It is about a boy with a deformed face who is entering school for the first time. It is an amazing story and one I recommend to all readers. Teachers this is such an amazing book to set the tone for your year!

Today we learnt how to create our own Tagxedo's, we discovered how to change the shape, font, colours and shape to personalise our key words. Check them out on our class blogs and leave a comment - P3 Blog

Look how much fun we are having!

We have been having lots of fun in P3 this week!

Science:

We looked at chemical reactions to begin our science unit.

We mixed Redbull and milk together and made predictions (hypothesis) on what would happen. 

After recording the results we came up with an I wonder question... 

Mrs Hay came in to view our experiments and posed the question 'Would the same reaction occur if you altered the colour?' which sent everyone into a flurry of I wonder...

Next we added food colour to milk and a small amount of dish washing liquid. 

We followed the same I predict, results and I wonder format. 

It was a very exciting lesson which led into what other experiments could we do and school and how could we alter today's experiments to achieve different results. 

Maths/Technology:

We had two challenges to complete with a 45 minute time allocation for each.

 Each group had 5 people (Leader, Scribe, Questioner, Timer, Resource Collector). 

Challenge 1: Using only one bag of mini marshmallows and one packet of spaghetti construct the tallest tower in a 45 minute time period. 

Challenge 2: Using only 1 roll of toilet paper create the largest area and perimeter you can (each sheet of toilet paper must be touching). 

There was lots of team building, leadership, supporting each other, math language and fun being had! 

Challenge 1 was definitely the class favourite, although this may have been purely due to being able to eat the marshmallows at the end!