Buddy Time

We really enjoy spending time with our buddies in Room 6. Over the past couple of weeks we have be doing all sorts of things with them including reading, art and technology!

Wearable Art skill building - Training Day

We had a great day last Friday learning new skills and getting ideas for our final artwork.
It was lots of fun because the whole year 5/6 team worked together in the hall.
We worked in groups of four and had a limited time-frame in which to come up with an outfit to walk down the catwalk. The teachers also limited the materials we could use so we had to get creative. Our outfits also had to show examples of weaving, sewing and folding.

Ten Top Tips for Narrative Writing

Our writing focus for this term is Narrative. Our first task of the unit was to brainstorm what makes a great story. We worked to groups to decide on 10 top tips for a great story.
Our next step is to share back our ideas to the class to develop a success criteria for our future writing...watch this space!

Peer Mediation - Take 1!

Over the past couple of weeks the students in Room 13 have been learning the essential skills of PEER MEDIATION. We are now at the point where we need to practice these skills to become more confident in assisting others to resolve their conflicts.

In the last session we looked at the mediation process:



Check out this short video of Oscar assisting Mia and Amy to resolve their fictitious conflict. Does he follow the process?





Awesome job Oscar!

Goal Setting - Mindmapping style

This week we have been setting goals to direct our learning for the term. We used a mindmapping structure to form our goals and state what strategies we will use to achieve them.
Before we started we discussed a set of criteria to follow when creating a mindmap. This is what we came up with:

* Our branches needed to look 'organic' i.e they needed to look like tree branches.
* Each branch needed to be the length of the writing.
* Each branch needed to be coloured differently.
* We needed to make our sentences short, using keywords.
* We needed to allow space to add to our mind map at the end of the term.
* We needed to add pictures to support our ideas.

Tell us what you think!

The Treaty!

What a great start to the year! On the first week of school we have discussed the qualities of a successful classroom. From this we have made at set of guidelines we wish to follow for the rest of the year. We have all agreed to follow these expectation to ensure every can be the best they can be!!

Beach clean up

On an usually sunny Wednesday afternoon we took our Room 3 buddies down to the beach to search for rubbish! At the same time we made a tally of the rubbish we collected to assist us with our statistics unit. We collected a total of 515 pieces of rubbish!!

We plan to collate the data and present it in a graph. (watch this space)

Thanks Room 3 for your fantastic help!

Confidence Courses are go!

Last week Room 15 started the construction of our "Ultimate Confidence Courses". We have been working incredibly hard, starting with putting our designs onto paper. We have been working in groups to develop our courses so everyone has needed to focus on the task at hand so we don't let anyone down!
All courses are due to be finished by Tuesday so they will ready to be presented to the camera. Watch this space throughout the week for updates!

Let the bridge making begin!

What makes a quality Recount?

This term we are study Recount Writing  in Literacy. Today we had a discussion around "What makes a quality recount?". We formed groups to brainstorm what we thought were the essential components of a recount.

 

We then discussed our ideas together to develop a set of criteria to follow when writing in the recount genre:

Day 1!

Welcome to the new school year!

It was a great first day today in Room 15. Sounds like everyone had a very relaxing break.

Our first task of the year was to establish some guidelines that we want to follow to ensure we have a successful learning environment for 2010. We started off by thinking about this question:

"What kind of classroom to we want to have?"

 

After reading our responses together, we formed groups to brainstorm some guidelines for the year:

                                    

After sharing our work we collated our ideas to construct our Class Treaty:

Don't drop the Anchor

Green Gold Celebrations

We had a fantastic day last Friday to celebrate receiving our Green Gold Enviro Award. Amazing Powhiri and very yummy hangi. Well done everyone!

Inquiry Evaluation Term 3

For Inquiry this term we have been studying NZ history. All of us completed an individual inquiry on a subject of our choice. This entire process involved a lot of skill including developing key questions to assist with researching, skimming and scanning for relevant information, note taking and note making and finally publishing and creating a report.

As part of the assessment and conclusion of this unit, we need to prove we have become an 'expert' in our subject by presenting our inquiries to someone at home. Today we practiced presenting our information to a peer. We also assessed ourselves on how well we thought we went throughout the whole inquiry process.

Jigsaw Reading

Last week during inquiry we were investigating animals that live in the catchment. Each reading group read a fact sheet about one animal, either the mayfly, cased caddisfly, the banded kokopu or the long-finned eel. After becoming 'experts' on an animal we then split up and went to another group to present our findings and listen to others about their animals.
We are now 'experts' on all four animals!

Buddies

In room 15 we are big buddies. Our buddy class is Room 3!!!!
We help them with learn their reading rockets and reading books.

Our Class Treaty

What a great first week at school! It's been great getting to know everyone in Room 15. Everyone sounds like they have had a fantastic holiday.
On Wednesday we got into groups and discussed how we would like our class to be so we can all learn in the best environment. Below is our class treaty we have made. We have all agreed to try our best to follow these guidelines throughout the year.

What do you think?

Welcome to 2009

Welcome to 2009 and Room 15's brand new blog! I hope you all had a fantastic holiday. Im looking forward to catching up with all of you when school starts next week.

Our big Idea for this year is 'Making a Difference'. We start the year with making a difference to our peers and ourselves. Our Inquiry focus for this term is of course Camp which happens from March 10th to 13th.

Our Key Competency focus is Managing Self

How are you going to make a difference to yourself and others at camp?