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Personal Inquiry – the creativity grows!
WOW – we’ve had another amazing Personal Inquiry session today- congratulations to every single member of our class on their creativity and inventiveness!! This week we had even MORE cooking, a dance routine – filmed in front of a live audience, popstick models, games made, 3D popstick constructions, Art works, tie dying t-shirts, models made with a mixture of construction equipment, books and technology used to present people in our class (very clever groupings Maya) …..the list is extensive.
One of the skills that stood out this week was teamwork – everyone got along with each other, supported each other to make successful creations, helped if asked, offered to help others if they thought they needed some support and gave each other lots of positive feedback during the gallery walk – Well done Team!!!!
We’ve got a short clip from the dance routine by Danielle, Sriya and Holly- what do you think of their routine?
Here’s some photos from today’s session:
Here’s Maya’s fantastic book about our class – she’s presented her learning using the Explain Everything app. Great work Maya.
Maths Games
We’ve been learning some new Maths games as a warm up in our Maths lessons. Our teacher learned the game during at conference with Michael Ymer.
Last week, we learnt ‘Get out of my house‘ which was a dice game that had us practising our number skills using the 4 operations – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Today we started learning a new game called ‘Total Recall‘. It’s a card game where we use the 4 operations to play and it really makes us think about the different strategies we can use – how to get as many cards as possible.
Here’s the rules of the game:
Place 6 cards face up on a grip mat so they don’t slide. The remainder of the deck kept together face down. Students take it in turn rolling a ten sided dice [ Can use a six sided dice ]. Using the number that is displayed the student is challenged to use combinations of [ 1, 2 or 3 cards ] cards to equal the number. Cards used to make the answer are collected and kept by each student and then replaced from the deck. The game continues until all cards have been used. Young children will use addition / subtraction to make answers using two cards. Older or more able students can use any combination of operations, decimals, negative numbers, fractions, order of operations etc and use up to five cards. Students need to articulate how they make the answer, trying to gather more cards than their partner. Once all cards are gone students total all card numbers to see who wins.
These photos from today’s session may help you as you play – good luck and have fun playing.
We’re going to be showing these games at our Open Night next Tuesday – pop into our class and try them out!
Personal Learning Time
This week we continued our personal learning journey through Personal Inquiry Time – or Genius Hour.
We’ve found that our wondering wall / brainstorming sheet of paper is a huge help – we record our ideas, change our minds and make suggestions for others if needed.
We’ve been using some online resources to help inspire us if needed. Caine’s Arcade has been a big inspiration, as well as ideas from Pinterest, Art Attack and Mister Maker.
Every student in our class is making lots of progress in many areas. Not only are they investigating and creating topics that they are interested in, we can see many other areas also developing. During our gallery walk and reflection time at the end of each session we reflect upon our learning and the skills we are developing.
We created a long list of skills we think we’ve really developed –
- planning – what are we interested in investigating?
- being organised
- preparing materials ahead of time if needed
- following the steps needed to carry out our inquiries – like procedure writing activities we’ve done this year
- locating materials needed
- sharing ideas
- helping each other as asked
- collaborating with each other – we LOVE to help each other
- co-operating with each other
- problem solving – by ourselves or by chatting with others
- creating models/ games/ items/ movies that we just love!!!
We’ve recorded an introduction to our Personal Inquiry Time this week.
Here are photos from our latest fantastic session!
Today Tara and Jaime added a video as a part of their reflection. They created a poster about rubbish in our school yard and shared their poster with one of our Reception classes as they are investigating a n Inquiry unit about Refuse, Reuse, Recycle.
Here’s the clip of Tara and Jaime’s message.
Tennis Clinic
On Thursday we went to a Tennis Clinic to learn new tennis skills and practise skills we’ve learned over the last few years. We’re very lucky that our classes have a free tennis clinic every year and so we can build up our skills each time they visit.
Shane was the coach and he taught us how to do a forehand, backhand and have rallies.
Here’s some photos from our session.
Tennis Clinic on PhotoPeach
Personal Inquiry Time
We had an AMAZING Personal Inquiry time session today. Our Personal Inquiry time is a direct link to the Genius Hour passions you may have read about. The students in our class have loved having time to make, create, investigate something they are passionate about. Every week they’ve investigated new areas or revisited topics that they’ve loved and want to investigate further. When we reflected upon today’s session we thought today’s session was OUR BEST ONE EVER!!
We had lots of different creations – arcade games (inspired by Caine’s Arcade), models made out of popsticks, clay, cardboard boxes, paper, recycled materials, iPad presentations – after a bit of app smashing, Art works, shoe box dioramas, books, cooking – with a Keynote pressie to show others the steps to make Milo Balls – just to name a few!!!
Each week we reflect about our session and discuss our successes, disasters and what we can do next time. Our reflection sessions are a really important part of the process and it’s how we learn about each others creations and what inspired them to create it.
Here’s some snap from today’s session:
Bookweek – Connect to Reading
Today we had a Bookweek assembly. Every student in our school was asked to dress up as a book / movie character. Our SLEG students hosted the assembly and each class had a turn at walking around all of the students and showed them their costumes.
We loved some of the costumes we saw. Our photos start with our class and then show some from different students in our school.
What did you do at your school to celebrate Bookweek?
Assembly Awards
We’d like to congratulate Felix, Danielle, Thomas, Elana, Leila and Archer on receiving an assembly award. As you can read on their certificates, the children received them for excellent work and attitudes in their learning.
Well done guys!!
Ways we love to use technology
We LOVE to use technology as a way to show our learning. We are lucky enough to have laptops, desktop computers, iPods, iPhones and iPads in our daily learning activities.
We always use our devices to look at and use content, create, collaborate, think critically (and solve problems) and communicate. We’ve really embraced app smashing- using different apps to improve our work and then presenting it via the class blog or presenting from devices to our class as the audience.
Here are some great shots of us using technology as a part of our learning.
Great spots to read!
How great is it to find just the right spot to read……
Where do you love to read?