School Assembly

Hi Parents/Caregivers

We have our assembly next Tuesday 4th October.

For our assembly can you please bring along as many floral clothes/towels/sheets or tablecloths as possible that the students can either wear or wrap around their waists. 

Can we please have them by Monday so that we can have them organised.

On Tuesday can your students please wear a black t-shirt and some black shorts or leggings to school.

Many Thanks

Mr Baylis

Here's an example

Our Noise Experiment

Mr Baylis worked into the wee small hours last night completing our noise level chart.

Our day is broken down into our main learning areas, and how long we will be approximately spending on each one.
We then decide as a class at the beginning of the day what we think our noise levels should be for the different parts of the day. We have a mixture of whole class and group activities and these are split into noise levels as well.

We will trial this next week and reflect on whether we think it has been helpful or not.

If you have any reccommendations/ideas please feel free to comment below and let us know.

(Our initial noise chart)

Noisy Classrooms

I was looking at Miss White and Room 2's blog page the other day

http://turuturuschoolroom2.blogspot.com/

saw their discussion about Noisy Classrooms and was so inspired i decided to try it out with Room 1.

Here's the article:

I then asked the students in Room 1 what their thoughts were. This generated great debate as approximately half of the class enjoyed working with noise while half didn't.

The question was then asked, 'How do we meet the needs of every student in the class in terms of noise level?'

Here are our initial thoughts:

We then took one of these, a noise chart, and explored ways of creating a chart that could assist with this.

Here are our drafts:






We have decided to combine bits of each plan to create 1 noise level chart for the class. It will be created soon and we will trial it for 2 weeks. We'll keep you updated with how it's going.

A big thankyou to Miss White and Room 2 for showing me their wonderful ideas and for inspiring our own.

Brain Skills

Wednesday mornings we are now looking at our Brain, the potential power it has, and ways to help us switch it on.

As an introduction we looked at a video that was emailed to Mr Baylis. Follow the instructions on the video and see if you are as surprised as what we were!!

If you have any brain skills ideas please feel free to let us know!!

Questioning Skills

Here in Room 1 we are continuing to try and develop ourselves as better questioners. We are using Bloom's Taxonomy to help us think of broader questions.

Here is a link to help: http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/researchskills/dalton.htm

Today we were given a photo of a building to look at from this website:

http://villageofjoy.com/50-strange-buildings-of-the-world/

We were then given the following challenge. If we had 3 questions to find out as much information about the building as possible what would they be?

We thought we'd asked some good in-depth questions until we compared them as a class.

Here's the photo and what we found

 

If you have any suggestions of deeper questions we could ask please feel free to comment and let us know.

Sushi Reports

WALT Research and create an informational report.

After the fun we had making Sushi, Mr Baylis told us that we were to write a report on it. We wrote down questions about what we thought would be useful information, and researched the answers.

We then used the following template as a guide to writing our report:

Here are our final presentations: (If you click on the picture it will take you to them)

Quadblogging

Mr Baylis was visiting our friends from Room 14 at Hamilton East School and saw that they were joining a project called Quadblogging.

Here's a video explaining what Quadblogging is:

Our Quadblogging buddy classes are:

http://6b2011.brookburnprimary.net/


http://y6jh2011.stjohnsrc.net/

http://harriers.primaryblogger.co.uk/


Check them out leave a comment and share some of your experiences : )


Also thankyou to Room 14 Hamilton East School for introducing us to this wonderful opportunity!!

One of our classmates, Blair, is currently having a wonderful holiday in Great Britain.

As we're currently studying cultures and as I know he will be reading our blog : ), I'd like Blair or anyone else with knowledge of the Great British culture to please leave a comment below and tell us about it.

Mr Baylis

Current Events

Our focus for Current Events at the moment is to form and justify an opinion about a contentious topic.

Our topic for today is: Should schools still have a library?

We read this article from the website stuff:

Check out our thoughts on our wallwisher.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to let us know : )

Japanese Culture

Today we made Sushi as part of our study of Japanese Culture.

Check out how it went:

This website is another really good way to explore Japanese Culture. Click on the picture and enjoy the site.

Our next stop on our trip round the rugby world cup is Japan. We are going to pretend that we are hosting some Japanese rugby supporters and they become homesick. They still want to learn about New Zealand culture, however, we will need to include aspects of Japanese culture into their stay to make them feel at home.


To get us thinking about Japan i'll ask a question:


Japan has a sort of nickname (like how New Zealand is the land of the long white cloud)


What is this nickname and why do they use it?


Post your answer below : )

Current Events

Today for current events we were focusing on forming and justifying our own opinions.

We discussed the fact the Hawera has decided to unofficially 'adopt' the American Rugby team during their stay for the Rugby World Cup.

The question was then asked: Should Hawera 'adopt' the American Rugby team.

This created a neat discussion amongst the students with the overall opinions split roughly 50/50. Check out what we have to say below.

What are your thoughts? Post a comment and let us know!!

Round the world challenge

We are working our way through the novel 'Round The World In 80 Days' and are thoroughly enjoying our trip with Phileas Fogg, Jean Passepatout, and Detective Fix.

Mr Baylis has set a challenge task for Room 1. Design your own trip around the world in 80 days.
The criteria are as follows:
- Each continent (except Antarctica) needs to be visited.
- The trip is to be no more than 80 days.
- The trip is to start and finish in Auckland.
- At least 2 modes of transport are to be used.
- The trip is to cost no more than $20,000.

Here are a couple of websites to help you:


http://www.rtwpricetag.com/round-the-world-trip-budget-cost-calculator.php


http://distancecalculator.globefeed.com/Country_Distance_Calculator.asp

We'll keep you posted with how we are going and what our finished itineraries are.

Searching the Internet effectively

I was shown this really cool video about searching the internet and as research skills are a current focus in Room 1 I thought I'd share it with you : )

A big thank you to Mrs Gurney from Coley Street School for showing me this!!

Cool Websites

Here are some neat websites for you to check out. To try them just click on the picture.

Gymnasium for Brain.

Lots of fun activities to challenge and test you brain power (the speed maths section is particularly good)

Snappywords.

A really cool online dictionary.

Enjoy : )

Homework Task

Your homework task this week Room 1 is to create a poster about your chosen New Zealand province.
Here are the provinces again to help you:

Here are the key facts you wanted to find out:
- What are they proud of?
- Special landmarks?
- Why do people live there?
- What are they famous for?
- What famous people have come from there?
- Tourist Attractions
- Land Features
- What makes them different?

After Nathans question about provincial colours I have also added this picture to help as well.

I look forward to seeing these posters in a weeks time : )

Mr Baylis

Website Ideas

I'm really impressed with the comments being made on our blog!! Thankyou for contributing and making our blog interactive.

I'm going to set another challenge for you. I'm looking to add more website links for games and activities to help assist with the learning in our classroom. To help i've come up with some headings: Maths, Literacy, Thinking.

If you have a wonderful website that fits under one of the headings, or you have a website that you find fun please comment below tell me the website and how it helps with our learning.

Mr Baylis