What cha got cookin?

  Pooooo-weeee the stink of onions boiling away in my house.  Reminds me of my childhood visits to my grans house where she would cook onions in white sauce...smells gross, tastes GOOD.

I am boiling red onions, and avocado skin and a pit for a Science experiment on natural dyes.  Hopefully the students are surprised by the dye colours they produce? 

I'll also do a red cabbage dye and then change the colour using an alkaline and acid.

Kitchen science is such FUN.

Put Pen to Paper

Writing has always been an area that most students seem to struggle with, admittedly, I have also struggled to find ways to engage students.

Recently, my eyes have been opened to the need of student voice.  How can I help them when I don’t know what they actually need or want?

I recently came across an article based on questions asked at drama based workshops held at a Hamilton primary school.

The students were in the three groups based on year level, years 3-4, years 5-6 and years 7-8.  As I teach years 7-8 I will only use their data.

The students were asked, what they liked about writing.  

The year 7-8 answer was:

• having free writing with their own topic  

They were also asked what they struggled with when writing.  To which they responded: 

• Ideas - getting more than one (I’m not sure if they meant they struggle to come up with many ideas for one topic, or they are not given enough topics to write about)

• Story progression (I understand how this could be difficult especially when writing tasks or topics are set, and the student has no experience of the topic)

• Making the words flow (I tell my students: read, read, read to build up their vocabulary base, plus a  list of banned adjectives, e.g. nice, big)

• Physical writing (eek, even I struggle with this nowadays. To help overcome this, my students need to complete their writing in an exercise book.  To help with penmanship one of our learning intentions is to take pride in our work, therefore working slower to produce neater and tidier work if need be, quality over quantity)

• Story development (as with story progression)

• Disappointing your teacher  (I don’t ever want my students to feel disappointed for this reason)

• ALL LEVELS some students said it was boring.  When questioned further, in 99% of all cases it came down to them not having an idea. (Again, this shows students need to relate to the topic they are writing about)

© Judi Billcliff Rainbow Poetry 2019  www.rainbowpoetry.co.nz

In term 2, I spent more time breaking down writing, than actually writing stories or text.  

I started with something simple like nouns and adjectives. Asking the students what a noun was, what an adjective was. Surprisingly, they were not all confident in answering those questions.

I put up a picture of animals in a jungle and asked students to give me nouns from the picture, and adjectives, and then we moved onto verbs, and adverbs.  Pushing the students more, we looked at similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, and alliteration, all the time using just one photo.  Granted the more objects in a photo the easier it is.

At the end of last term Room 6 made a huge shift in their writing test, with over 25% of students increasing their e-asTTle grade by 3 sublevels, 10% by 4 sublevels and 19% by 5 sublevels.  Surprisingly, similes featured aplenty in their writing.

Student feedback: “In my opinion I like the writing sessions that we are doing because we are going into more details about our writing which I think is good because then we can use the details in our writing test.”

 

7. 26th October 2018 DF Intensive

OMG!  Today we were introduced to some amazing sites and technology, thanks to the guys from OMG tech, Viv and Krishna.

We did a bit of 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 (binary).  I had always wondered how that worked so it was great fun to finally learn how to convert data to binary.




https://www.helloruby.com/


I also got to play Captain Destructo where we were able to dismantle a hard drive...such fun!!  It was interesting to see the ins and outs of how it worked.  It made me wonder how anybody realised they could put all these bits and pieces together to get a functioning product...scratchy head emoji.

We  learnt an offline computer communication activity.  This explains how a computer communicates.  We mixed up the learning of how a computer works with a bit of fun playing pac man with a mix of components such as, play doh, cords, and wetware (humans).

9. 9th November 2018 DF Intensive Agenda

The new 3R's
Reflect, Rewind, Reward:

9th November the final day of DFI:
It's been intense, a lot of information and knowledge has been passed on to me, which I, in turn, can pass on to my students.  
I have learnt some great titbits, which will make preparation and teaching easier.
There are still a few things that I need to brush up on, but with the foundations set, it is easier to build on
that knowledge base.

One of the great aspects of digital learning is the ability to rewind and look back at resources and
content that has been provided or gathered and make sure it is accessible to all stakeholders.

And the reward...meeting a bunch of wonderful educators, learning, creating and sharing information,
and a three hour test 😍 who doesn't love a good test.
The benefit of completing the google test is it highlights what you do know and what you could work on...maybe next time I'll hit 80% :( 

B.I.N.G.O.

share it bingo

forms, sheets, and maps

DFI: Session 4 Friday 21 September

Yah, after finding my Blog had been suspended for naughty behaviour, I still don't actually know what that was, I've been allowed back in.

 Google Forms

I have completed a few google forms but I have never prepared one.
Today I prepared a form named "Munchies."  It was used to discover what type of snacks people ate and how often they ate them.
I enjoyed that in preparing a form the formatting is at your finger tips.

The thing I found most difficult was preparing a question where I could use a linear question format.  After looking at the results, the linear question format did not really fit the actual question.

My Maps

For My Maps we had to answer 2 questions: What was your best international holiday destination ever?  and choose TWO destinations (provided) for your next holiday.
With the results we could map the answers onto My Maps.
My Maps allows you to add layers to your map.

Google Sheets

Exciting stuff, I'm a HUGE fan of spreadsheets.  They can be daunting at first but once you get the hang of them, they are brilliant, and huge time savers.

I choose Amelia's blog to work with.

We looked at the number of blog's the student had posted per year and completed a Google sheet with the information.

Pepeha

I had fun designing the slides for my pepeha.
I especially love the picture I used for my awa, which is in fact a picture of the Taieri River.

My Pepeha