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:

 

Flappy Bird - Coding our own game

Today in class P3 learnt about computer science and were able to code their own 'Flappy Bird' game.

I got the idea from Tracy Tindle (who I have also hitchhiked on her Minecraft Lifeforms Project) - check out her blog - http://misstindlesclass.wordpress.com/

They looked at the pros and cons of the current game and made improvements they thought would make the game more marketable.

P3 already have previous experience using scratch, they were able to move through the levels very quickly. There are 10 levels, each level adding in a new element for them to think about. The only challenge from them was that they hadn't realized that the green blocks were the event blocks and that they required purple and/or blue blocks underneath them. They also needed to ensure they didn't have any loose blocks in the creative screen.

My Flappy Bird Game

Next session:

- Binary code

- Angry birds game