Reaching the end of 'Wonder'

We are reaching the end of our novel study 'Wonder'. We have created character description posters, tagxedo's, had literacy circles and made predictions throughout the book. 

We are listening to the audio book and really enjoy that it is broken into different perspectives voiced by different people. 

We only have two parts of the book left - Miranda and August.

Some of our predictions and comments about 'Wonder':

Tanner - 'Wonder is a awesome book. I think that the school year will finish and the war will be over and it will be all ok. If you have not read this book I think you should because it is so cool'

Sacha - 'We have been reading the book ‘Wonder’ and it has been sad, awesome and funny. My prediction for the end of the book is everyone will treat August like a normal person and not look at him like he is an alien from space! I would recommend this book to the people who are willing to shed a tear and have a good laugh!'

Maya -'We have been reading Wonder for the last term and we are nearly at the end! Our teacher has assigned us to make a prediction. I think August will become very popular and not be the "weird, creepy dude" anymore and Julian will get caught and be in huge trouble!'

'

Minecraft PB4L City

Another year and another battle setting up and facilitating how I want/need Minecraft to run in our classroom. This year I am lucky enough that my team (myself + 3 other teachers) are on the MC bandwagon.


We began our Minecraft set up the same as we did last year.
I told all the students to go on and show me a creation. I asked them to build something to share with the class that showed their Minecraft skills. I do this for two reasons. Firstly I see the levels of skill and expertise in the room and secondly I am able to see the students' digital etiquette for one another. After this we used post it notes to reflect on our session. We reflected on what was good, what was bad, what our goals were for future projects and began creating our Minecraft treaty.

Student Positives:

- Teamwork
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Learning a new form of ICT
- Gaming in the classroom
- Maths (co-ordinates, volume, spatial awareness)
- Digital citizenship
- Our school values (respect, honesty, relationships and learning)

Student Negatives:

- Griefing
- People all trying to build on top of each other
- Some people not knowing how to play and needing constant help
- Issues for some getting on - having to go down to library and grab another laptop


Students used all of these to create a treaty that they all signed. They have agreed to abide by their treaty and have set consequences that they decided on for when they break it.

We then decided to build a PB4L (positive behaviour for learning) city.

We used another white sheet of paper to map out what our city required:
- Housing
- Roads
- Footpaths
- Workplaces - based on dream jobs
- Parks, forests, farms - nature related things


P3 began building all of the above. They were working very well with one another to achieve a successful result. We then bought in P2 and P3 became the tuakana teina to teach them how to use Minecraft. P2 then joined us in our area and began developing their own homes and workplaces alongside us. The students were commenting positively on newly formed relationships, successful teamwork and the ability to collaborate with a large group of students.

The main goal of this activity was to develop a digital etiquette and ensure our school values are also represented online.

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! 

Skittle Maths

There is no cooler way to engage kids into maths than with candy!

This skittle maths resource was a great start of year resource to evaluate my class's understanding of many maths concepts (Place value, understanding word problems, operations skills, decimals, percentages, collecting data, co-ordinate planes, fractions and graphing).

The resource is designed for numerous lessons. I bought 5 bags of skittles which was way too many! I ended up using 2 bags for 28 students. I had them work in pairs giving each pair 25 skittles. They began by recording down the colour and number of skittles they had at the top of the first page so that they had the data to work with in future lessons. After recording our data sample down we began with place value followed by operations skills and for my top group they created a pie graph of their skittle colours (next lesson they will be working the percentage of colours in their data sample). It was easy to scaffold and the students were happy to work independently to achieve their results. Of course the best part of the lesson was when they were allowed to eat their skittles!

The resource is now being used in our guided maths rotation 1-2 sheets a week. 

Click for resource