Friday Fun - 2/4/10

The past couple of weeks have been exciting for a number of reasons. It was great to meet up with parents during the three-way interviews and to have the opportunity to discuss each child's learning and development. We have been doing lots of special things in the classroom and having fun with our learning.

Harmony Day Activities

For Harmony Day this year students wore orange and made a donation to the Red Cross efforts in Haiti. In the Year 1/2 and 2 classrooms we selected some activities for students to rotate through. One teacher taught students some origami, another taught students a game, another made a circle of decorated orange hands with them, and I played and discussed this video from explore.org. Our message was that everyone is different and we can appreciate and learn from the differences of others.

Earth Hour

We didn't do anything too spectacular for Earth Hour this year. We continued with our Friday Fun, but with all the power turned off. The room was darker, but not too dark. You would think that it would be quite easy to play with Lego without any power, however I did have students ask if we could put some music on, and I found myself itching to get on a computer and finish typing up students' stories! It's sad how reliant we become on electricity.

Cityscape Artwork

Year 2 students created cityscapes by cutting out paper buildings and then using black marker for adding detail. They added land and other features using oil pastels.

Excursion to the Botanic Gardens

The day of our excursion started out with a good bout of rain. It got so heavy at one point on the bus ride that we seriously considered turning around and returning to school. We decided, however, to continue as planned but to have something to eat in one of the classrooms before beginning our journey around the gardens. Finally the rain let up enough for us to move on. The Year 2s investigated the bridges throughout the gardens and completed booklets made by Miss Poore. The Year 1s explored the biodiversity of the gardens, pointing out interesting features of plants and insects. They also completed this booklet provided by the Botanic Gardens.

Bridge Building Day

Year 2 students brought in boxes and other items from home to use for building bridges. They were given some time to plan their design and then got busy with the building. It was great to see the designs they were coming up with and to see their responses to some prompts ie. "How do the cars get up onto the bridge?"

Year 1 Presentation

While the Year 2s built bridges, the Year 1s went through the photos that were taken during the excursion. They then created a PowerPoint presentation and speeches to share with the other Year 1 students to explain what they had seen and learnt at the Botanic Gardens. They enjoyed selecting the pictures to include and changing the background colours for each page.

Friday Fun - 27/3/09

Fun this week:

Maths
After all the difficulties with teaching subtraction with trading last week, I couldn't simply move on and ignore it. It was eating away at me. I had to conquer it. So this week, rather than moving on to multiplication and division, I spent some more time on subtraction. I found some great videos on subtraction with regrouping and played these for the class.


We then used the rhyme "If there's more on the floor, then go next door" to help us solve a range of two digit subtraction questions. This also helped with explaining the more difficult subtractions from 2000 etc. The rhyme can be applied by the first neighbour saying "I'm sorry, I don't have any numbers to spare. Let's try next door" and so on. I think my students really enjoyed the idea of the numbers being characters and fitting into a story!

My new challenge is to help my students to look at the question first before flying into the written solution. Too many were using the written method to find the answer to 50 - 49 which I know they can do mentally!

We also touched a little on multiplication and division (as I didn't want to overlook it completely) by reviewing some one-digit multiplication and creating the "families" for those facts. For example, 5x7=35; 7x5=35; 35 divided by 7=5; 35 divided by 5=7. Again, my students loved this idea of the numbers being in families. I'll have to remember this as I teach them other concepts - they like to bring the numbers to life!

Spiders in Spider Webs
This relates to our Rowan of Rin unit, but we did it in our homeclasses, so I've decided to include it in Friday Fun. We listened again to the passage in chapter 6 of Rowan of Rin where the characters face thick spiderwebs covered in big, black spiders. We used white oil pastels on black paper to create a web background. We then created our own spiders from shiny black paper and stuck them on the background so that they stood on the page with bent legs. We made the web sparkle in some places using some silver glitter paint. They look really fantastic displayed in our classroom.
Jonno and I were chatting about how great they were and that chatting lead to more ideas and so we decided it would be good to teach the kids how to write a description about spiders and spider webs and then attach their writing under their artwork on the display. We brainstormed some good adjectives and then students created sentences using these words. I suggested that they try some alliteration and rhyme but use no more than three adjectives per sentence. The writing that resulted was really fantastic. One of my students then suggested that we type up these descriptions in our lab lesson rather than handwriting the final copy. Brilliant idea - and a brilliant opportunity to teach some simple word processing tips - changing the page orientation, selecting all text, changing font etc. This lesson was also great for teaching the correct use of commas.

Communication - Assessment Task
As part of our Integrated Inquiry this term, we want our students to learn how to communicate effectively with others through a variety of forms. In groups, students selected a type of communication: phone calls, email, letters, postcards, cards, face-to-face, blogs, SuperClubsPlus webpages. In these groups they needed to consider the purpose for this communication (including advantages and disadvantages), the conventions and tips to effective communication with this form. They then needed to decide on the best way to present this information clearly to their peers - all while cooperating with others in their group.
Students had most of Friday to work on this, but still need a little more time to fine tune their presentations. They have been working very well together and have been learning a lot both about and through communication.

Description
Both literacy classes did some descriptive writing this week using some ideas we obtained through PD last week. I found this picture of a soldier with a kitten. Students began with the sentence "[Name] is a soldier." They then wrote a description of his clothes, his face and the kitten in his arms. After this, students wrote a flashback to tell the story of how the kitten came to be in the soldier's possession. Linking the flashback to the description was pretty tricky for most students and didn't come naturally. This is something for us to work on in future lessons.

Earth Hour
On Friday our school turned off all electrical power between 11am and 12pm in recognition of Earth Hour. We tried to continue with lessons as much as possible. In Year 4 students wrote in their reflective journals and moved to spaces in the room with greater natural light.

Walk-through of Cross Country
Our Cross Country carnival is two weeks away so on Wednesday we walked the course that students will run - just to make sure they know where they will be going. The next day some of the students were complaining about how their muscles were sore from walking the track. Looks like we have some training to do before the big day!

Rowan of Rin
For information about what we learnt in our unit of work on Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda, click here.

Friday Fun - 13/3/09

As I pointed out to the parents of my students, this week was a "hold your hat and enjoy the ride" sort of week. Monday was out due to a public holiday. My teaching partner, Jonno, and about a fifth of the Year 4s were out on Thursday for a rugby day and Friday was our swimming carnival. We had a bit of teaching in the middle there, but had to pack a lot into a few days!

I must say that Jonno was absolutely AWESOME this week. I was impressed with how calmly he pulled off all the sport organisation - and so professionally as well. The swimming carnival was a huge success and the kids had a fantastic day.

Fun this Week

Readers' Theatre
I spent Monday night making a quadruple batch of playdough. Hubby was confused: "Aren't you teaching Year 4 now?" I figured that even Year 4s like playdough now and then! Or at least the chance to express themselves creatively and explore ideas physically.
This week's readers' theatre was about B.W Hawkins and the Dinosaur Models which are displayed at the Crystal Palace Park in London. In line with the Art-full Pedagogies strategy from the Springboards into Literacy workshop I went to, I decided to give my students a chance to create their own playdough dinosaur sculptures before reading the script. Students worked in small groups to create their dinosaurs using playdough, match sticks, pasta and sequins.
Then, as students began practising the readers' theatre scripts, they had personal experience of what it's like to create dinosaur models and the text was far more real to them. Students put a lot of expression into their reading and were interested to see the process of B.W. Hawkins when making his models.

Assemblies
On Tuesday we had a special farewell assembly for our retiring PE teacher who has been in the school for 12 years. He has had a huge impact on his students over the years and has fed their enthusiasm for an active lifestyle. He will be greatly missed by the students, staff and wider school community.

We also had a visit from Stirling Mortlock, a well known local rugby union player. He spoke to students in grades 4-6 about Earth Hour and discussed the importance of looking after our planet every hour, every day - not just for Earth Hour. When we got back to class students began creating their own posters to remind people of appliances that use electricity and provide tips for reducing electricity consumption.

Class Meeting
We had a class meeting to discuss and complete a Biodiversity survey for the school's Student Representative Council (SRC). Students considered the areas of the school grounds they like, dislike and use. They listed the types of wildlife they have seen within the school grounds. They then considered changes they would like made in order to improve the appearance of the school grounds and the opportunities for biodiversity. The SRC is collecting this data from all classes, staff members and families in the school community.

Visitors
We had a number of visitors in our school this week. Some teachers from the UK visited to see our school and the programs we run. My teaching intern also visited to meet students and get a greater sense of the classroom organisation. She will be beginning her 8-week internship at the end of March.

Maths
This week we looked at lines and angles in our maths lessons. I was surprised by how interested and enthusiastic the students were when it came to learning about angles. The questions students were asking showed great depth of thinking. It's disappointing that we could spend so little time on it due to all the interruptions. I look forward to exploring it further later in the year.

Will You Be Funky 4-Eva? Quiz
As mentioned above, Jonno took some of our kids (and some Year 5/6s) to a rugby day on Thursday. For a bit of fun and relationship building, I designed a trivia quiz (in PowerPoint) for part of that day. Students got into mixed groups of six and created names for their teams. Questions came from a mix of subject areas and some included photos or videos. Each team was given three coloured match sticks that they could trade in - one for a dictionary, one for a calculator and one for a computer - to help them with a question. Every fifth question was a "Who Am I?" followed by a team challenge. The challenges we got to were:

• perform a nursery rhyme
• present a tongue twister
• build a sculpture or building with no more than 20 pieces of lego

It was a lot of fun and gave students opportunities to shine both academically, dramatically and technologically.

Swimming Carnival
The carnival was a lot of fun. Students competed in races (including a 'boat race' with rubber tyres) and then played in the pool. They even had some time on a water slide. We were all exhausted by the end of it, but the kids also had a disco at night. (I admit - I skipped out on that one).

Rowan of Rin
For details of our Literacy Unit on Rowan of Rin, click here.