Puarenga Tabloids

Mokoia Intermediate left for Devon (Taranaki) on Wednesday. Puarenga learning centre was down one teacher and about a third of the students. We decided that we would have our students run their very own Top Town type games for the rest of the school.

This was a three day inquiry process

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Day one:

Students elect a manager and vice manager - these students are in charge for the three days. All group leaders to report to the managers at the start and end of every session.

Students to opt into which group they want to work in for the three days.

Options:

- Media (Reporting, photography, video)
- Activity (Deciding and organising the events)
- Planning (Timetable, groups and all organisation aspects)
- Marketing (Making posters and flyers to advertise to school, contacting businesses and parents for prizes)

Once all students were in a group, each group elected two leaders.

Now our leadership team was complete.

These leaders had the responsibility of guiding the team and reporting to the two event managers.

Groups began the planning process.

We looked at previous Top Town events to give stimulus for ideas.

Day two:

Continuation of the planning process, finalising how the day is going to run.
All groups working with each other to ensure all aspects were covered and that the deadline would be met.

Day three

Event set up
Practice run through

Whole school assembled to be briefed and the events began.

Students PMI in groups and individual reflections in class.

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Pros

- Seeing students step up into leadership roles
- Completely run by the students
- Ran smoothly on the day
- Students had fun and all were involved
- Planning group had covered all bases and stood out as being exceptional
- Problem solving
- Communication
- Active engagement for majority of students
- Year 7s led and well as year 8s. Year 8s responded well to younger leadership
- Students proud of the event


Cons/Improvements

- Didn't run entirely smoothly - early on organisation was under pressure
- Event managers were tied up with the minor issues instead of being the total overseers
- Needed a more structured time table/map for where each group goes next
- Behavioural students pushed the boundaries
- Very stressful on teachers to let go of the reigns and allow the students to make mistakes and fix them by themselves (huge learning curve for me!)

The Iron Giant

Off the cuff days are the best!

Today we had an 'Iron Giant' day. We read the novel (It is very short) and focussed on making predictions based on the information given and our own experience, analysing our predictions and altering them. We did this in a literacy circle at the end of each chapter (5 chapters total). While reading the student's were drawing what they visualised the Iron Giant to look like.

After we finished the book we got out a huge box of Lego. Each student created their own Iron Giant. We are going to use these to measure the perimeter and determine the area of. For my top maths group they will be determining the volume required to box their Iron Giant and creating a prototype of this. 

As the students were building their Iron Giants we put the movie on. We paused it every 5 minutes and added to our class compare and contrast map of the differences and similarities between the book and movie. Boy oh boy their were so many differences that I was surprised to say P3 were extremely disappointed in the movie and were asking if they could film their own alternate endings. 

We ended the day by doing a little drama and hot seating how the characters were feeling in certain situations. It was an awesome day!