Discovery

For today was our last Discovery Time so Grace and I decided that we would do a Discovery Book about George Washington who was a president of America. George Washington lead the battle for Independence of America from England.

The activity was to make his mansion which is called Mt Vernon. We worked together really well and managed to finish it in one day unlike some others.

I Will Not Go To Bed

We read a great book today titled, 'I am not sleepy and I will not go to bed'. Many parents would understand the many excuses children might use to not have to go to bed.

Book Fair Advertisment

Today we went to the Shed again to have another look at the books. We made this animation to show what we did in the ten minutes. Then we wrote a quick advertisement and practised saying it ready for Marshall to record it.

Tangrams

Today for poetry and response we read a poem about Tangrams. We did some as well. It took us a while to work it out.
If you can do the easy ones you might like to have a go at some harder ones as well.

Fifa Country Homework

As one of our homework tasks this week we had to research and present some information about one of the countries with teams in the Fifa World Cup. Children were allowed to choose their own country that they were interested in and how they presented the information they found out. Here are some of our wonderful presentations.

The first is from Grace- with a little help from her big brother. I had to cut the end off the video because we know that we should not put our surnames on the internet.

Keegan did his homework in his Google Doc here. He made this cool interactive football model as well.

Keeley did her presentation in Google Apps as well. Here it is.
Tarn did his presentation all about Italy. His presentation looked pretty flash for us.

Jack also made a model. The big screen at the end of the stadium showed great attention to detail.
Nathaniel won the vuvuzela with his fabulous presentation on Cameroon. We particularly liked the way he taught us about Cameroon. He really explained the slides very well. Firstly here is his presentation and then after that is an edited video of Nathaniel teaching the class.

Cameroon presentation

Here is the short video of Nathaniel sharing his presentation. The sound is not great but you can see what a great job Nathaniel was doing.

I was so impressed with the effort that everyone put in to research and share their learning.

Discovery Time Review

As the term draws to a close we reviewed the term's worth of Discovery Time. As a teacher I like to try new things and felt that Discovery Time was worth the effort in time and preparation. Here is what the children thought.

PLUS.....

• Everyone can get involved.

• It's very creative- it's our favourite school day.

• We can learn from mistakes and keep on learning.

• You are the boss of your self and you can be creative.

• We look forward to it every week.
  

• We can tidy up on time, without a hassle.
  

• There is a good choice of things to do.

• We can improve ourselves- at the beginning I would loose things and now I almost don’t.

• We are working together now and sharing more.

• I like all the activities!!!!!

• I like the bubble blowing because you do exciting experiments to see how you can blow even bigger bubbles.

• Kids got on with it and we didn’t make a big fuss.

• Making the Discovery models is really hard.

• There is always something interesting to do and there is a good choice. I like to build stuff that we don’t get to do at home

• I like to put the Lego robot together because I am good at doing it.

• It is a good way to practice managing ourselves.

• We always get along with each other.

• I like the colourful, creative things that we do.

• I focus more on the stuff that I am doing now than when we started.
  

• I like Discoverying new things!

MINUS.....

• Sometimes we don’t get other school things done.

• It is expensive to buy extra things for the class to use.

• It takes loads of time, resources and money.

• Some of the things we didn’t get to finish in the time we had.

• Some times things get a bit messy.

• I get paint on myself.

• We are not so keen on doing the reading and blogging options during Discovery because we can do that at home any way.

Here is our Discovery Time Journey...

http://moturoa.blogspot.com/2010/04/discovery-time.html

http://moturoa.blogspot.com/2010/04/discovery-time-photos.html

http://moturoa.blogspot.com/2010/04/discovery-time-2.html

http://moturoa.blogspot.com/2010/05/discovery-time-3.html

http://moturoa.blogspot.com/2010/05/discovery-time-4.html

http://moturoa.blogspot.com/2010/05/discovery-time-5.html

http://moturoa.blogspot.com/2010/06/discovery-time-6.html

http://moturoa.blogspot.com/2010/06/discovery-time-7.html

S Disco Highlights

I know you've been waiting to see some of the cool photos of all the creative people who came to our S Disco on Friday night- well here they are. We can look at the rest at school.

Discovery Time #7

Our Discovery Time continues to be very popular in class. Today we finished off our salt dough sculptures with a couple of layers of gloss enamel to bring out the colour and seal the paint.


I think they look fabulous.

They are very creative.


Luc, Conor and Jack worked together preparing a Viking Longboat after researching about the Vikings.


Mrs Pritchard came through for a look and commented about how more developed our paintings are now than when we started.


Summer put her sky on her shoebox rocky shore diorama. It looked very realistic.


Sharon made a beautiful card using the craft material and the rub off lettering sheets.


Sean was very intent and determined to solve the problem of how to get the robotics kit to do what he wanted. We used a printed sheet from Mr Winter- a teacher in Hamilton that we has Skype screen shared with last week. He is giving us tips to help us.


Georgia used the instructions on the origami website from last week to teach herself how to do some origami.


Tommy and Sam looked through the Discovery magazines to do a some research on Sir Winston Churchill so they could complete a project on him in next week's Discovery Time.


I bought my marbling kit to school. We talked about the oil spill in America and how the oil floats on the water. We dropped coloured oil on the water, made it into swirls with a matchstick and dropped paper on it to soak it up.


Everyone was in awe of the beauty of the marbling colours. Next week we can use the marbling paper to cover our spelling notebooks.


I loved the kind and supportive way that Nathaniel showed Tarn how to do the marbling as Tarn had been away at his guitar lesson when I had showed the rest of the class what to do. He would be a great teacher when he grows up because he explained it very well.

The video shows how marbling is done.

The theme of Discovery Time is Managing Self and creative problem solving- children are growing in their skills and ability to do this. I am really proud of them.

Jump Jam Video

Linda has been working hard with the senior girls for the Jump Jam competition. They have heaps of energy and show great commitment.

Here they are performing at Waimea's assembly on Friday.

Bella capella

Bellacappella from Waimea College gave a performance for us today. They were impressive. Some of the performers were able to raise their voices really high and others were very low.

The conductor was encouraging us to sing from our diaphragm. To sing with your diaphragm you need to be able to control the air in your tummy. We practised that by saying - che, che, che.

They also played a couple instruments- a keyboard, a boolean drum, a quatro, a box and kazoo.

We recognised Jamie, Sam and Floyd.

It was an amazing performance.

Mind Reader

Daniel is leading our basic facts learning challenge and I had to make up some more levels to keep up with him. I was looking for more web links to support adding larger numbers and came up with this mind reading web site. It is quite spooky how it reads your mind.

T.R.I.C.K.Y.

Tommy's Train Video

Remember a while back when we did 'making' for our homework? Tommy and his Dad made a train video. They made it on a video recorder- not a digital one! It has taken me a while to get to turning it into a digital version for our blog.

It starts out a little rough but it is well worth watching until the very end.

Discovery Time #6

The card in the photo is a card for my Grandma and she has passed away. I am going to put it on her grave. She would have liked the card.
I made this for Grandma because I was sick over the weekend and she looked after me while my Mum and Dad were away. It is a thank you card.
Zoe and I made origami for Discovery Time. We went down to the library but we couldn't find a good enough book so we went on the internet and found this web site. We practised and then we got to use the expensive origami paper. I am going to bring a book from home for next week.

To make a diorama you get a shoe box, cut a hole in the lid for the sky and little piece out of the side to see through. Then you draw some figures on a piece of cardboard, cut them out and stick them on in the right place. Lastly you paint the inside of your box and put in some blue cellophane over the hole in the roof to make it look like the sky.
Marshall, Summer and I made dioramas made out of one of Allanah's old shoe boxes and some cardboard creatures. We made the theme to do with the rocky shore. I thought it was fun doing it on my own because when I was younger I needed help to do it all the time.
We are having a bit of trouble with the robotics kit. We want it to follow a line that we have drawn. We did some Skype screen sharing with Mr Winter in Hamilton who helped us out. It is is now sort of working but not quite. It is supposed to follow the line but it only follows the edge of the paper- but only sometimes.

New Zealand Curriculum Online

TKI is a New Zealand teacher resource web site where good teaching practice ideas are shared among teachers and families. They have just started a new section called Pedagogy. Pedagogy is the study of how children learn and how teachers teach.

Mr Webb from Melville Intermediate sent me a link to this section on TKI where there is a link to an EdTalk video I made a while back on the sorts of things we do in our classroom.

Mrs Pritchard's Tidy Number Video

Mrs Pritchard had a tidy number birthday on Saturday. To celebrate she did a tandem sky dive over in Motueka. Isn't she incredible- we are inspired and in awe of her courage.

Add your birthday congratulations in the comments.

Jousting in England

My Dad went to London and he went to this castle. He saw some knights jousting.
The knights were trying to break each other's lances. They were on horses and they tried t hit each other's shields. My Dad liked it and said it looked quite fun.

He liked to see all the knights and the jousting.

The video is about the knights jousting and trying to break their lances. I thought the video was great.

Science Experiments Go Sky High

On Thursday Mr Crosby and his class from Sparks, Nevada, gave us a science lesson via Skype showing us how hot air rises. Last week we had given Mr Crosby our High Hopes on his blog and they were taken up high in a payload on a balloon.

For the science lesson he lit a piece of very light paper and we watched while it lifted into the air when it got hot. He also heated steam inside a soda can and then plunged the can into cold water. The drop in pressure crushed the can. We are going to try that experiment at school.

The video shows part of the experiments we did and the lift off of the balloon. A video camera on the balloon recorded it's flight until the air pressure collapsed the balloon. We need to thank Dr. Eric Wang & Dr. Jeff LaCombe at University of Nevada, Reno for assistance with the project as well.