21st Century classrooms

Here is some of the work some of the students have been doing in class reflecting on their work for 21st century classrooms

Charlottes Prezi



Augusta, Chloe, Natasha and Erin's news item.


Sam's Prezi

Charliot's Powtoon (Just a small part of many presentations she made)




Plus man many more things by other members of the class. Check them all out on their own blogs!! Links to the right hand side!

Thanks for viewing

Classroom Sharing Time!!!

Today we had an awesome time sharing all of our amazing work with the other 2 classes. We focussed on creating 21st century learning environments and I have been so happy to see the amount of work that has gone into this from the students. Here's a quick snippet of the children setting everything up this morning.


The class all produced their own designs for the 21st Century classroom.
Here are a few of the projects we created as well.

 It has been so great to see all of their hard work showcased. Everyone was very impressed. Room 13 students came and viewed them as well, so did Mrs Field. We will be putting something together to show the work off to the whole school at the end of the term as well.
The children had to explain what their designs were and why they chose the different things for their classroom. The main theme was for enhancing their learning rather than going for things that looked flashy and cool (although if it was flashy and cool and enhanced their learning what a bonus)
The children actually inspired me to change the classroom around as well. I have changed my desk to a collaborative work station so that the children can use the desk with myself at the centre which will be great for groups work. My desk gear is now in my office (which never really got used except to store stuff) and my desk in class is the size of a students desk with my lockable cabinet as well.
YOU have been change makers for me.
Well done Room 8!!!

Science Roadshow

The children saw some really great things at the science roadshow last week. They showed a huge amount of enthusiasm for the exhibits and were also challenged into showing some of their understanding to win a prize and the children worked really hard to show that understanding as well.
I managed to get shrink-wrapped (it feels rather uncomfortable if you were wondering) and we also saw some cool experiments on pH and Air Pressure.
Here is a couple of shots of the day.

Mila's fun with fizzy!

Social Dance

SOCIAL DANCE

After last weeks great achievements with social dance we carried it on today with a couple of sessions. Our class, along with Room 7, learned a new line dance today and the students grasped it pretty quick after having it broken down for them.

Here's a few photos and a short video of what we did today. Yes I joined in as well, unfortunately I had to do the filming so you don't get to see my slick dance moves.

Wonderful happenings

EEK!!

It's been a few weeks since the last blog post. Time to post more!

Something the students have feared.

Social dance began this morning. A huge amount of the students were extremely apprehensive about this but after giving them a huge surprise this morning of having social dance written up on the agenda for today the majority seemed to enjoy it. After social dance I had many students coming up and asking when the next session was going to be and the disappointment of hearing next Monday was audible from many of the students (mostly because they wanted it sooner rather than not at all). It was the boys turn to choose first today and I was extremely happy to see the maturity of most Room 8 boys in choosing partners. Regan and Tyrin were the first to politely ask for partners paving the way for the rest. Well done you two!! The class learnt a Gay Gordon today. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos or videos. Next time though...

Spectacular science

Two of our students entered into the science fair from our class and both received highly commended at our school science fair. Congratulations Grace and Zoe! These students then went on to represent our school at the Hawkes Bay Science Fair. Zoe received a special prize from the judges for her science fair and Grace won a prize from a quiz given out on the day. 

Grace with her science fair project on dirty retainers

Cross Country

After a huge amount of training over the last few weeks we had our Cross Country. A great amount of our class competed in this event and many students preformed very well competing against their peers.

Here are some of the placings in our class (other were to shy to have their's shown)

Year 7 boys

Regan 2nd

Robert 5th

Sam 14th

Year 7 Girls

Charlotte 7th

Mikayla 19th

Megan 20th

Here's hoping we keep our flag on top and win the event.

Here are some pictures for your enjoyment. They were running so quickly past me I couldn't get snaps of them all

Ka kite ano.

Challenges

I've been a bit slack on the posting this week! EEK!

THE CHALLENGE

2 days ago the class was given a task of making my life easier by inventing something that would help me. As we are looking at innovation this term the class was very innovative and came up with various ideas for making my life easier (They weren't allowed to give me ear muffs and a blindfold though)

Here is a couple of examples of what the groups came up with:

Two completely different designs here but they both incorporated different elements that would make my life easier. They only had 1 hour to do this so the results were very good. THe one on the right is a life sized clone of me with gadgets attached to the body and the one on the left is a comfy couch with everything you would need at your fingertips.

FUTURE FOCUS

After this we had a discussion about what process they should have gone through to make sure they fulfilled the design brief in the best possible way. The groups cooperated well together assigning different tasks according to people strengths which was great to see, the only down side was that only a couple of groups actually did the research for the design asking me what it was I needed. Hopefully with the next task they will research a bit more fully.

Tuesday the 30th of July

Pronumerals was the focus of maths today. We looked at some strange machines (drawn on the whiteboard) that changed the values of numbers. Each numeral that went into the machine was changed each time. We represented the numbers going into and out of the machine by pro-numerals, letters that stand in for the number.
We also began on our procedural writing today. The class developed some ingredients list for some interesting smoothies or milkshakes that they would like to make in class. From these ingredients we then came up with titles that would catch the reader's attention and inform them about what the recipe is creating. One group finished the work a little early and came up with a theme song for their milkshake idea. The last section of the day was taken up with innovation. We looked at what innovation is and the class performed a small activity to show their innovation. They had to pass the ball between them in the quickest time. Some groups were innovative and modified their ideas as they were testing them.