Making use of the snow!

To replace our winter sports, we actually did some real winter sports like building snowmen in our house groups. Awesome fun, but very chilly. 

Collaborating with Reading on Google Docs

The children leave comments on the reading activity/document and have discussions. Google sends me an email showing the flow of their 'electronic' conversation. I get to see a lot more learning and some very dodgy spelling! Mr B

Google 'Workshop'

We are trying Google 'workshops' at the moment. This is where Mr Bailey creates a lesson using Present, which is a Google App, and we read the teaching notes, watch videos and complete some activities. We also get to work with others at our level from Room 19 and we are encouraged to collaborate to work out what we need to do. Mr Bailey checked in at the end and we all did really well. It was quite challenging at times, but by working together we worked it out. If we still haven't understood it, we can watch the lesson again whenever we want as it's in our Google Drive. 

Joseph Sullivan

The visit from Joseph was inspirational. The children were captivated by his talk and sharing what he achieved. He was such a down to earth kind of person but the amount of commitment and hard work needed to achieve his gold medal was unreal. Joseph answered a lot of questions honestly with a great sense of humour and it wax quite emotional watching his race and the children going crazy when he won. To allow the children pass around and let them wear his gold medal was particularly generous too, not sure I would do that! :) Mr B 

Google Docs for Reading and Writing

Room 20 are learning new ways on how to use Google Apps for Education to support our learning. The key thing about GAFE is that it enables you to collaborate. We all have writing buddies who we have shared our writing with and they can check our work against a Success Criteria. Room 20 came up with symbols to represent areas of writing so it makes sense to us!  We are now reading articles on the same document and answering questions left by Mr Bailey. The wonderful thing is that when someone leaves an answer we can add comments to agree or discuss as opposed to just writing the same answer. We are really enjoying this new approach so far.

Class Dojo Winners - Indigo and Brayden

Congratulations to Indigo and Brayden who have had a fantastic start to the term. As you can see from the pie-chart Indigo has gained a lot of points from showing self management in and out of the classroom, home learning and simply participating in class lessons regularly. Keep it up guys! Who will win in Week 4?

Community Help = L & P stickers

Part of being in Year 7 and 8 is reaching out and helping at home and in the community.  If the children provide evidence of sporting achievements, helping at home and community - they receive L & P stickers. If they receive 5 stickers they get a stamp in their book. Congratulations to Alyssia who looked like she worked very hard to move a lot of leaves!

Google For Education - Sharing Lessons

One of the amazing things you can do with Google Documents/Apps is share everything! Half of the class were at Kapa Haka today and missed some of the lesson so Mr Bailey shared his lesson with the links to the videos. We can now look at the presentation again and use the criteria we created to help us write our introduction to our persuasive letter. 

Red Cross - First Aid and Safety

For our health unit we are looking at well-being which includes first aid and safety. Jackie was our instructor for the day from Red Cross. She was fantastic. Jackie was fun, informative and kept us busy all day! We worked on dangers, how to call for help, response, the recovery position, airway, breathing, bandaging, choking and lots more. It was an awesome day.

Buddy Class Visit to Exhibition

Year 7 and 8 created an exhibition of their work to share with the school and Arrowtown Museum. We really enjoyed showing our buddies the work we created. They asked some very difficult questions!  The feedback we have had from teachers, parents and children has been fantastic, the hard work paid off!

Cross Country

Training hard for the school championships. Mr Bailey has graded us into divisions and we race in groups of 5 or 6. If we win a division we move up and if we can bottom we move down. It's become very competitive!!

Cyber Safety

With the introduction of Google Dasboard it has raised a few interesting issues.  Mr Young is able to see every email received and sent by the children.

The system also alerts him to certain activities which, clearly stated in their Cyber Safety agreement, they are not allowed to do. For example, some of the children have used their emails to create accounts with Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram. It was a great session where Mr Young explained why they shouldn't be creating these accounts. Also, he pointed out that they have to be 13 to create these accounts and explained why i.e. their personal information is shared and what is displayed on these sites are not suitable for their age.  We also found out that some apps have notified users of age-restrictions after they have signed up and its as simple as clicking on 'ok' to continue later on. As a parent, Mr Bailey was very worried about this.

It is important to note that the session was really positive and it was not a 'telling off', it was about learning from our mistakes and understanding how these websites use our information and why they have age restrictions. Thanks Mr Young, it was a fascinating lesson that was certainly thought provoking i.e. Mr Bailey had to change some of his privacy settings!

Go Pro at Camp!

Link to the video - Go Pro at Camp!

Mr Young kindly uploaded our Camp video so we can share it. It also can be found on the new school website, check it out. What do you think of the new school website?

Did you know it was created on Google Sites, it's free! If you need any tips on creating your own website, please see Mr Young!
We could share our work on the blog or create a website with examples of our work. Something to think about!

Lakes District Museum Visit

http://www.handsonhistory.co.nz/latest-news-blog/2014-05/arrowtown-schools-wwi-exhibition-posters.237/

Amy and David, from the Arrowtown museum, visited our exhibition today and were so impressed with the quality of our work.  They were so impressed that they are returning to choose some work which will be displayed in the 'The War To End All Wars' exhibition from 18th October 2014-15th February. How cool is that! Please use the link at the top to check out the Arrowtown Museum blog of their visit.

Exploring Topic Ideas for Speeches

Room 20 are inquiring into the question, 'What makes a great topic to talk about?' We have been reading speeches from last year which reached the final and evaluating the topic itself.  Room 20 considered certain factors to help decide whether it was a good topic or not. 

Identifying Features of a Persuasive Text

Room 20 are inquiring into the question, "How is a speech structured?'  We looked at an exemplar of a piece of persuasive writing and created a list of features. We then compared that to the speeches from last year and found lots of similarities and differences.Eventually we want to answer the question, 'What makes a great speech?'

Arrowtown has Google Dashboard!

Mr Bailey is very excited about this! All our Google Docs will be displayed this way and his Gmail account will not be 'cluttered' with our work.  Apparently there is lots of other cool stuff we/he can do, but he hasn't worked it out yet. From the dashboard Mr Bailey can see all our work and access it quickly to give us a feedback which is a good start. We will keep you up-dated to any new developments!

Our Inquiry this Term is... Speeches

This term we will be inquiring into what makes an effective speech. Room 20 have to create a persuasive speech and share it with the class. We will create a criteria of what makes a persuasive speech and the best ones will go into a final and they will have to present in front of parents and Mr Harris! Our first job is to look at a variety of speeches and identify how they are structured. Also, we need to identify some interesting and thought provoking arguments. Can you think of any? Please add any ideas.

Class Dojo Points Distribution for Term 1

Here is a breakdown of the Dojo points Mr Bailey gave out last term. A lot for home learning and participating! We have discussed the focus for this term and it will be based around working with our buddy in a 'professional' way. Parents can access individual accounts and see what points we have. Room 20 will try to share points every two weeks so we can celebrate those children who are doing particularly well. Do we need to change the behaviours? Any comments.