Friday Fun - 3/4/09

Fun this week

This week was packed to the brim with exciting learning experiences.

Communication - Assessment Task
Students began this task last week. This week they finished preparing their presentations and presented them. Three groups chose PowerPoint presentations, two chose role plays and a talk, and others chose posters (with or without a talk). It was very interesting to see how students organised their ideas and cooperated in their teams. As this was the first time I've given my students this level of student direction with a task, I learnt a lot from the process. This time I gave explicit details about what the presentations needed to contain - in the way of a rubric - but I did not give students a tool to help them organise their information and plan their presentation. Fortunately a very experienced relief teacher was in the classroom with me at the time and was able to throw something together to give students more direction. This is something that I will remember for next time.

Maths
We got to play with angles again this week in our Maths lessons. Miss Eschauzier (an intern who will be with us for eight weeks) took small groups out to work on ordering acute angles and measuring them with a protractor. I worked with the rest of the class exploring angles with compass directions and clock faces. Yet again, students loved playing with angles and learning how to name them. Students also completed a test to determine areas of strength and areas for development from this term.

The Ridge
We finally started our ridge project this week. Doug and Jenny from the Park Care group, came to speak to students about our school's previous involvement with the ridge and start a project with this year's Year 4s. They showed us pictures of some of the plants to look for, and some of the weeds that we will be responsible for pulling out. It was really enjoyable to learn from people who are passionate about plants and maintaining the natural environment on the ridge.

Part-way through lunchtime, we walked up the ridge to see it all for ourselves. I chose a few people to be our photographers, and other students had the option of bringing notepaper and pencils to record information. The following slideshow is a collaborative effort from students and myself.

A few students discovered the magic of moss in a drought-stricken land. The following video shows their discovery.



When we returned to class students worked in self-chosen teams to "graffiti wall" all the things that they had seen and learnt. Each student had a different coloured texta. They worked simultaneously to record their ideas. Most of the groups filled a huge page in just 15 minutes!

Our project on the ridge will involve students in taking responsibility for the care of their local community through protection of the ridge. We hope that students will develop a greater understanding of and connection with nature in the local region.

Performance
Students performed for parents this week to celebrate their learning this term. Students from the Fife and Drum Band performed five songs and Readers' Theatre people performed four plays that we learnt throughout the term. I was really impressed by how well the students read and played. They looked really professional and seemed so confident. Parents were invited to stay for light refreshments, and many commented that they had enjoyed the performance.

Homework
This term students have had the flexibility to work with a Homework Matrix. We encouraged students to choose at least two activities during the term and do quality work in presenting these. Activities chosen relate to the Higher Order thinking strategies of Bloom's Taxonomy and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. Students have chosen a range of activities to explore and demonstrate their learning. One student created a video about friendship and welcoming a new neighbour. Another student created a lego animation of one of the scenes from Rowan of Rin. Please visit his blog and leave an encouraging comment.

People who support us
After exploring some introductory resources on "Support", students considered people who support them at home, school, and in the wider community. They used Kidspiration to create a diagram of these connections and wrote about how these people support them. Students got off to a great start and their mind-maps were very detailed. They will have the chance to finish them off at the start of next term. We hope to add these to the student portfolios. Once students have finished, I will check if someone is willing for me to share their diagram here.

Self-evaluation
Next week we will be having three-way interviews. These involve the student, parent and teacher coming together to discuss the student's progress. We prefer for students to do most of the talking in these interviews. Students have been reflecting on their development in their "reflective journals" since the beginning of the year. Each week they write about their challenges, successes and plans. They used these reflections and their recent maths test to decide what they will share and discuss in their three-way interview. I haven't done three-way interviews with students this age before, so I am keen to see the result.

Rowan of Rin
I will not be posting about Rowan of Rin this week, but instead will include a final Rowan of Rin entry next week.

Friday Fun - 20/2/09

Fun this week:

Bushwahzee
On Wednesday we had a travelling performance group, "Bushwahzee", visit the school. They worked throughout the school day to coordinate a range of dance moves with our classes. Then, in the evening, families came back to the school to see the performance. This year's theme was "Beach Party" so the kids came dressed up in board shorts and Hawaiian shirts. Some even wore grass skirts! It made for a really enjoyable evening and everyone seemed to be having a lot of fun. Things like this are great for bringing the community together, raising morale and building a sense of unity.

SuperClubsPlus
I had a mix of good and bad news this week. The good news was that everything is just about ready for us to run with SuperClubsPlus. The bad news is that my state's Department of Education doesn't support student blogging, so it seems unlikely that we will be able to have a class blog in the near future. We will still be able to communicate with families through My Classes, The School Website, and my blog; and we'll be able to explore a safe Web2.0 through kid-friendly SuperClubsPlus. This week I introduced students to SCP and sent home the registration forms. Once I get these back we can get registered and get moving.

Voice Thread Challenge
I tried to implement my newspaper idea using Voice Thread this week, but I kept coming up against obstacles. When I signed up for Voice Thread, it seemed that I could use it free as a teacher, but since then I have been receiving messages to say I need to pay money. I could cancel out of those pop-ups, but then I kept having issues with the running of Voice Thread. It kept jumping to the save/embed page and for some reason our voices weren't recorded. On top of all that, I've been told that my state's Department of Education doesn't like us using anything that publishes student work on third-party websites. So...after all of that, I have decided to use the Smart Board software or maybe PowerPoint to achieve these outcomes instead! If I use PowerPoint, I should still be able to share the final product with families through school websites.

Friends Book
As part of our unit of work on the FRIENDS values, we put together a book about all the people in our grade. Students chose a name out of a hat and thought of three or more positive things about that person. After they decorated the page, we bound them all together and read the book. It's a great resource to get to know the kids better and made for a great team-bonding activity.

Maths
This week my maths group was focusing on 10 times tables and place value. I finally got around to setting up a Smart Board Notebook with all the pages I like to use in a Year 4 Maths lesson. I have a timer, hundred chart, place value chart, calculator, piggy bank and coins, number line, website links and other activities to promote Mathematical thinking. I also tried out my webcam/document scanner for a dice activity. Below is a video demonstration of this activity. (My first demo video - feedback is more than welcome!)

One place value game the class particularly enjoyed is called Wipeout. Students typed 21 469 into their calculators. Then they had to 'wipe out' the numbers using subtraction. For example, to wipe out the 4, they have to subtract 400. As students become more familiar with this activity they can play it together in pairs, or even individually.

Williamstown High School Band
On Friday afternoon we had a visit from the Williamstown High School Band (from Victoria) who played a number of great songs and introduced their instruments to us. Our children were enthralled and bobbed along to the music. I always love to watch the way students respond to music - it really adds to the atmosphere and has a positive effect on mood.

Rowan of Rin
We began reading Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda and completed a number of activities related to the book. I will publish these in a separate post over the weekend.

Friday Fun

On Fridays I like to reflect on some of the more enjoyable things from the week. In my complete exhaustion it reminds me of the great learning that has taken place during the week and helps to refresh me for the week ahead.

Fun this week:

Advent Calendars - This week we made star advent calendars to count down the days until Christmas. The star was a geometrical pattern and we made colourful links - one for each of the days until Christmas. Children take off one link each day as they count down to Christmas.

"Photoshopping" with Paint - I taught students how to use MSPaint to cut a photo of themselves and paste it onto a background. I saved background files from the Creative Commons Attribute Licence page with a name that referred to the photographer. Students made their new pictures and printed it out with a sentence attributing the background to the flickr artist.

Investigating Capacity in the sandpit - Students paired off and selected a small container and a larger container. They estimated how many sand-loads of the small container would fill the larger container. After 30 minutes of focused 'work', I gave them 15 minutes playtime in the sandpit.

Great Barrier Reef Paintings - We painted an A3 sheet of paper with water colour blues. We then cut out sea creatures from bright coloured paper and glued these onto the background. Students got ideas from a flickr slideshow based on the search "Great Barrier Reef". I also took digital photographs of students pretending to swim and printed these out for students to include in their artwork.

Shivoo - On Thursday night we had our end of year concert - our Shivoo. A stage was set up in the school playground and families brought picnic baskets and picnic rugs to pread out on the lawn for our performances. The classes performed a range of great items to entertain. The Year 1 classes did "On the Good Ship Lollipop" to tie in with our "The Way We Were" unit and "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree" to tie in with our "Are We There Yet?" unit. Once students had finished their performances, they either sat with their parents, or played with their friends. They had a ball! They wrote a journal entry about the night the next day in class.

Heads or Tails - We explored chance through the game of "Heads and Tails" and then students experimented with coins to record the way the coin landed after a number of flips.

Daintree Rainforest - After reading "Where The Forest Meets The Sea" by Jeannie Baker and discussing some facts about the rainforest, students began designing posters to encourage people to look after the Daintree Rainforest without actually writing "Protect the Daintree Rainforest". The challenge I set was to make it look so beautiful that no one would want to harm it. They got a good start to the posters and will finish them next week.