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Save your child's blog to your phone's homescreen

A great idea to get more involved with your child's blog. Easy to do and an easy way to remember to check up on their blog more freque...

Tuesday 18 October 2016

Fantastic video for encouraging a growth mindset



Which goes nicely with the Iceberg Illusion-being good at something takes effort and hard work!


Wednesday 14 September 2016

Production time

We are in full swing with our Production 'The Headliners'. Here is our main cast 'A' on opening night.

Leon, our Man of the Century, looking focussed-stealy tiger eyes!

Thursday 25 August 2016

Tuesday 23 August 2016

Year 6 ski day


Amazing video courtesy of Mr. Marston

From the very top of the world!
Rough day out.




Wednesday 17 August 2016

Blogger of the Week

In an endeavour to encourage the class to blog more frequently and to increase the quality of blogging, I'm introducing 'Blogger of the week'. They can win this awesome and super snazzy digital badge for their blog and can be featured here on our class blog to gain more 'hits' on their blogs. Yay.

Thursday 4 August 2016

Planting a Legacy

This Term has started with a bang. We've been lucky enough to have two tree planting experiences already. Our first was up the Grampians where we are planting trees to help the Brook Waimarama Sanctuary develop a 'Halo effect' (a safety net of native fruiting trees for the birds when they fly out of the Sanctuary). We had fun sliding around in the mud and planted one big podocarp or beech tree each.
 Rick from the Sanctuary pointed out this Kingfisher or Kotare on the way up to plant our trees. 


Happy tree planters

Next, we were lucky enough to get a bus up to the top of Piper's Reserve where we have been planting trees for four years now. It was lovely to see previous year's trees growing up big and strong. The kids were able to plant as many trees as they could in the hour provided. What a great day out!
 Great view from the top!
 Happy looking trees
Mucking in:)

Monday 6 June 2016

STEAMS Day

The Senior school has kicked off what we hope will become regular events. 'STEAMS' days are there to provide extra support in our classroom practice around the teaching and learning in key curriculum areas that are sometimes given less emphasis in the Primary school classroom. STEAMS is an interpretation of 'STEM' which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. We have added the 'A' for Arts and 'S' for Social Studies. 
 Freya and Sharmaine get ready to make some 'Stixplosions'.
 Jessie and Lucie coding an Mbot through a maze.
There was an amazing variety of activities on offer for the day. Students were exploding things, making things, coding things, building things, destroying things, sciencing things, experimenting with things, acting out things. It was a really great day:)

We are on the lookout for any parental expertise in any of the STEAMS areas; where you might be able to lead a small group of students for an hour and a half block. Our next STEAMS day is on the 22nd of June. 

Our First Mystery Hangout


I recently met an Auckland teacher who has had his class participating in 'Mystery Hangouts'. His class had been 'skyping/Hangouting' with classes around the world and he asked if my class would like to have a go. In a nutshell, you agree on a set time to 'hangout' and then through a series of questions that can only be answered by 'yes' and 'no' you guess where each school is in the world.

The class loved the experience and there was a great buzz in the room as the children rushed to consult google maps and pass information onto the questioners etc.
Each child had a set role in the hangout. We had welcomers, questioners, Google mappers, runners, trackers, managers, Googlers, videographers, bloggers....

I loved how the Hangout meant that we had to work as a class to solve the problem. My favourite quote coming from the mappers who would shout out in gusto "I need a runner"(to convey information to the questioners). We developed key geographical and mapping skills and we had fun doing it!

 Photographing and filming the experience. 

Important mapping information being passed on. 

We are keen to try this again and I am in the process of organising some schools that are further afield than Auckland. 

Wednesday 18 May 2016

Accelerated Learning with Khan Academy



Today I set the class with a Khan Academy account. khanacademy.org is a free website that allows students to 'learn anything'. As the website says...
Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. We tackle math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more. Our math missions guide learners from kindergarten to calculus using state-of-the-art, adaptive technology that identifies strengths and learning gaps. 
I encourage the students to regularly visit the site and to make a habit of adding to their scores and overall progress. I can keep check of how much time they have put into Khan Academy and what areas they are studying as well as seeing what gaps they have that may need addressing in class.  
So for example, here is a snapshot of some of the student's progress from this morning's session. If the students were able to practise for say 10 minutes a day in maths or coding, they would be sure to make some stunning progress! 

Also, I'm happy for those children that do not have easy access to the internet at home to use the chrome books at school and use their accounts. 






Sunday 1 May 2016

Team Tower Challenge

We got back into school today with a hiss and a roar. The kids were super engaged and enthusiastic about getting back into new learning opportunities. We started with a primary school classic: the newspaper tower challenge. Skills promoted were team communication, decision-making and risk-taking. We had tall triumphs and major flops.  All in a good days work!















Wednesday 30 March 2016

Genius Hour in Action

We are nearing halfway through our first Genius Hour projects of the year. These first projects are called 'Lite 2.0' which means we are running them like a trial run. Students are required to have a passion project or something they are curious to find more about. The students must have these three elements to their projects...

  • a driving question (what can I learn about/how might I?)
  • research
  • be prepared to share their findings with the class
We have a real variety of projects on the go. Some are exploring coding while others are looking into food, art, the environment, movie making, endangered animals...the list is near endless.

In term two we will run Genius Hour again and the students will be expected to share with the whole Syndicate and parent community. Their projects will also need to have a purpose or an outcome that will positively affect someone other than themselves. 

Here are some pictures from last week's session:










Sunday 20 March 2016

Moturoa Mission

We had a fantastic day out on Rough Island last week. Congratulations to the Wimping Willows and Crazy Carrots our two teams stocked full of Room One children who got stuck into messy, mucky and environmentally minded activities.

The two fantastic teams. 


Running and very hard to catch up with. 
Meeting a rare goat and making environmental impact decisions.  


 We found some bugs. 


Awesome photo IMHO.

Sleuthing among the tidal plants. 

Sunday 6 March 2016

Magical Marahau

A small selection of camp photos for you to see what a magical time we had on camp. There are more photos on the Marahau camp page -above, also on your child's blog.