Storybird Website

Today in class P3 had a play on the website Storybird.
I set very little guidelines. I told them they were going to write a picture book and that they could spend some time selecting the artwork to tell their story. They had not done a brainstorm or done any pre-writing. They used the images as a guide to sequence their story and then built on their stories from there.

We only spent one session on their stories and they came up with a range of different topics and story types. Some wrote humorous short stories. some created sophisticated pictures and other created how to guides.

They then had a buddy check and edit their work for spelling errors and missing punctuation. I still need to conference with each student on their story because when they presented there were still minor errors.

I was very pleased with the quality of work and it is definitely a website I am going to use again.

Tegan's Sophisticated Picture Book



Casey's Rhyming Tale



Tanner's How to Guide



Marnie's Funny Tale

Friday Night Hockey

Friday night myself and some other staff members went down to the turf to support our Mokoia White Hockey Team. 

I was able to take some cool actions shots of the kids for them to use for their blogging. 

They all played well, worked well as a team and have improved a lot over the term. Go Mokoia! 

Starting a New Book Club

Today was the start of P3's new 'Book Club'. Last terms book club was so successful that we decided as a class to start a new one. The kids enjoyed opting into a book of their choice and completing different tasks independently. We looked at about 10 books (most that were series to encourage reading, and most were dystopian because that is the new 'thing'), read the synopsis for them and watched some trailers. This helped narrow down the selections to six. 

In a previous post I showed off some of the work my student's had completed independently during book club time and how I run it.

The student's read the first chapter and began working on a blog post about their new book - why they chose it and what they think is going to happen.

This term the books we are reading are:

Point Value Art

Ms. Lopez in the Art Room has some amazing resources for implementing art into your classroom.

I found a Point Value art project when exploring her site.

 'This project works well for many grade levels and is a good opportunity to teach kids not only about colour theory and different values, but about thinking outside the box.

The project began with students following some basic directions, such as "draw 4 lines that begin and end at the edge of the paper."
After the lines were drawn and traced with black marker, I got down to the demonstration.  We incorporated different shading techniques with analogous colours to fill each new shape that was created during the first part of the project.
In the end, each student had practiced thinking outside the box, practiced colouring and shading, and had a beautiful finished product.'

Explicit instructions:

Part I Directions (do this with pencil):

1. Draw four lines beginning and ending at the edge of the paper.
2. Draw five circles.
3. Draw four triangles.
4. Draw one diamond.
5. Add one line that looks like waves.
6. Add two lines that look like lightning.
7. Draw three lines that are curvy.
8. Draw six short lines.
9. Draw one long line.
10. Add four more shapes.

*Go over all your pencil lines with thin black marker, then erase your pencil lines.

Part II Directions (do this with markers and colored pencils):

1. Fill in an odd number of shapes with a dark colored marker.
2. Fill at least five shapes with gradation.
3. Fill at least five shapes with pointillism.
4. Fill at least five shapes with cross-hatching.

*No shapes may be left blank.

Rules for Coloring (use the part II directions to make these combinations):

1. Make red turn into orange.
2. Make orange turn into yellow.
3. Make green turn into yellow.
4. Make blue turn into green.
5. Make violet turn into blue.
6. Make violet turn into red.

*These rules may be repeated as necessary to fill the paper.

Here are some of our completed projects: