Moving into week 4

Wow! This term is flying by.

Literacy

We are further developing our skills to rewrite questions as statements during reading work. We have been answering  questions about the texts we are reading using the questions in our answer. The aim is that our statements are informative; anybody can read our answers and know what we are talking about. We have also been learning how to create posters with a target audience in mind. 

Our focus in writing is 'ideas'. 

We have been learning how to use our dictionaries and thesauruses to help make our writing ideas more interesting. We have taken one student sentence (from a photo prompt) and brainstormed as a class to make it more exciting. We were all pretty inspired with our new potential sentence and spent some time drawing our own visual interpretations of it. 

We have started to look at author's purpose and recognise that authors write to persuade, inform or entertain (PIE). This concept will help us not only identify the intent of other writers but identify how to shape our own writing. 

We have been able to categorise different writing such as magazine advertisements and fairy rales using PIE. 

We have also been using our thinking skills to reflect on things we have learnt in class. We have started with lower order thinking such as remembering and how we have used our memories to help new learning in class. We have used this in our writing and to reflect on maths learning. 

Maths

We are learning about time, specifically elapsed time ( see the earlier post about time). 

Here are our clock time lines to help us work out elapsed time problems. 

We will take the opportunity to use time and clock faces to help us learn the 5 times tables. 

Time

We are learning to figure out elapsed time problems. Some of us are still learning to tell the time so we have had some challenges.

We started with some group work learning about telling the time to the quarter and half hour. We have looked at analog and digital time. 

Yesterday we started a qr code challenge. We found cards pinned around the room and figured out the time shown. When we had found all the cards we used iPads to scan the qr codes so we could check our answers. 

Some of us had a go at some more challenging time problems, but we found it pretty difficult. 

Today we made some clock timelines to help us work out elapsed time problems. We made our timelines and wrote down all the things we knew about time. We talked about how time was different from base 10 math, but we could still use skip counting in 5s or 10s to help us.

Finally we worked on a couple of elapsed time problems. 

Goal setting

Our goals for the year are starting to go UP!

We have been looking at our literacy and maths achievements so far and planning goals to reach at the end of 2014. 

Some of our goals are pretty high, so we are going to be working hard and in the end we will certainly be flying!

Homework challenge

We have got to the end of our first homework challenge. It was based on the Sochi Olympics. We had to pick a country attending and complete a range of tasks. The results are up on the wall and looking good.

Pencil holders

We have started the year with some recycling. We have made pencil cup holders out of recycled plastic bottles.

We papier mached the bottom of plastic bottles and painted them. Now we have containers to hold our jovis and pencils. 

Our first 2 weeks

We have had a pretty jam packed first two weeks that included an afternoon when the school had to close because of the water supply being disrupted.  

Literacy
We have been learning about the different types of sentences (statement, question, exclamation and command). 

We have been learning to identify different types of sentences, as well as rewrite questions into statements and vice verse.  All this work is going to help us when we are reading instructions and questions, so we can determine exactly what we have to do.  It is also going to help us when we are writing and answering questions.  We have been practicing using the question in our answering statement so that the reader knows what we are writing about.
We will be looking at questioning as a reading strategy next.

Maths

In maths we have been learning about place value.  We have been creating a place value resource to help us practice naming big numbers and we have been learning to write numbers in an expanded form.  This will help us later with addition and subtraction, as well as strengthen our understanding of our base 10 math system.

Topics

We have been looking at the story The Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl. We have been creating some enormous crocodiles of our own. We can't wait to get them up on the wall.  Photos coming soon.

We are also close to completing our first homework projects.  We have been looking at the Sochi Olympics - finding information about countries that are competing.  These projects are due Friday 14th February.  We needed a bit of extra support to get them done, so we have been using the ipads and laptops in class today to get all the research information we need.  Some projects are already up on the wall - photos to be posted asap.

STRIVE
We have been learning more about STRIVE.  We have had a review of Self Awareness, Thinking, Respect, Integrity and Excellence.  We are practicing using these values at school and in our daily lives.

This week we got to learn and practice some tennis skills.  We had a great time, but it was hard to keep control of that tennis ball!

Critical thinking and questioning skills

Well 2014 has arrived and I am feeling pretty excited. I have been madly preparing wall displays and resources for an exciting year ahead.

This year our focus will be problem solving. To help develop our problem solving skills we will also need to develop our critical thinking and questioning skills.

A minion reasons to problem solve

I have created this minion problem solving display as a hook and am hoping the kids think it is as cool as I do. (Thanks to some of my 2013 students who contributed their minions for the display).

Burning questions

Throughout the year we will be using Kagan's questioning matrix to track our questions and assess the higher order thinking used. As students ask a question, it will be recorded on memo note paper with the student's name and bulldog clipped to the matrix. 

For those not familiar with Kagan's matrix - the questions with the blue pins use lower order thinking skills, as you move to the right as well as down the matrix the questions use  higher order thinking skills. 

Our class will also be using Bloom's taxonomy to focus and develop our thinking skills during class time.  Bloom views thinking skills as fitting several categories from lower order thinking, such as remembering, to higher order thinking such as creating. 

Google time

I will also be introducing Google Time this year. 

  Google Time will involve students writing down questions that require further research. We will then spend 10-15minutes during the day to Google these questions. The aim is to encourage students to make the link between questioning, research, an enquiring mind and the wonders of our world.  It will also provide an opportunity to demonstrate using key words for searches and discussing good questions. 

Genius hour

Later in the year I plan on introducing Genius Hour. Genius Hour is an opportunity for students to research and complete their own projects.  We will develop research and questioning skills in order that students can decide upon worthy projects, so they can plan and implement research, and will be able to create strong creative presentations of their findings.