Week 7 - collaborative inquiry presentations

This year, our overall theme is Curiosity.  In Term One and Two we will be using this frame of mind to investigate animals.  Over the past two weeks we have really started to dig into this.

One of our first jobs was to complete a quick write. During this time we listed as many animals as we could.  This helped us to connect to our prior knowledge.  Once we had our list, our teachers challenged us to classify these into groups.  To do this, we had to look at the animals and then make groups by thinking about what they had in common.  We then used the 'Thinking' key competency to justify these reasons. An example from Ama is below.

Following this, we joined together as a syndicate in mixed groups to see what we knew about ten different groups of animals.  We completed a bus stop (with the help of our chromebooks).  The amount of knowledge that we generated was amazing.

The last step of the process was to join together in groups to come up with different ways to share our learning and present the main ideas about the group we had.  Mr Riceman and Mr Rattenbury videoed these.  As you can see from the presentations below, we had lots of choice and created things in our own way.  Have a look and please leave us some positive, thoughtful and helpful comments.

Week 6 - Assembly sharing time

At Waikowhai, we have whole school assemblies every Friday that are run by the kids in each class. This week it was Manukau's turn.  It was great to have the chance to present some of our different learning and also have the chance to use our big confident voices when presenting in front of a larger audience.

As you can see from the slideshow below, the range of things we have been working on so far this term is wide and varied.  If you are interested in anything further, please comment below and one of the Manukau blogging stars will get back to you.

 

You may find examples of some of this work on the student's individual blogs too.  Be sure to check the list at the side of our class blog further down the page.
Blog you later...

Show not tell, setting writing

This week we are working on using descriptive language by sharing our writing straight onto our blog.  The challenge we have is to describe a place using only six sentences.  After reading the description you need to guess the place that has been described. It would really help if you say what clues helped you come to this conclusion. Here is the one that Mr. Riceman shared with us to start.

1.   A blanket of white surrounds me in every direction I look.
2.   Mist escapes from my mouth with every breath I exhale.
3.   Small patches of exposed rock stand out like islands in the sea.
4.   Bright sun rays stream down, pounding onto the tall white cliffs.
5.  Crack, a block of ice tumbles down a cliff and into the sea.
6.  Strong gusts of wind whip frozen icy particles into the air that whip at my face.

Leave a comment below thinking where you think I could be and what clues you have for this.

Sphero makes an appearance in Manukau Class

It was Friday, it was supposed to be the annual beach trip day but the weather and water quality was against us and unfortunately the trip was cancelled. We were very disappointed about this so Mr Riceman planned a few fun activities for us back at school. One of these was a coding challenge that involved using our new Sphero robots. You can see the challenge below.

We had a great time working in groups scoring as many points as we could in short amount of time we had. There were lots of opportunities for creative thinking and problem solving as you will see in the videos below.  We can't wait for the next challenge.

Are you doing something similar in your class?  Would you like to find out more?  Please leave us a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment, we would love to hear your feedback!