Thursday 20 March 2014

Week before CAMP!

It's really amazing to think that this time in a week we will be at Lakes Ranch! After this busy week it will probably feel like a holiday??!! I know that there are lots of students really looking forward to the challenge that EOTC week brings.
Several highlights for me this week, including homework tasks, athletics sports and introducing some students to some great news websites.
Homework: this week Tamar made a Pinata and we had a whole lot of fun with that.



 We also had crystals made, fitness plans developed, animals created and a range of people "built" for us.
 

   
 The HNI Athletics Day was on Tuesday and it was a full-on, hot day! I was SO impressed by the Room 11 students; their attitude and participation in the various events was wonderful.













And today, with students away at Softball, HBHS and choir, those of us remaining spent reading checking up on a range of news stories from around the world!














So that was a brief glimpse of Week 7. Look forward to lots of camp photos and stories in a couple of weeks :)

Thursday 13 March 2014

Room 11's Week 6!

This week Room 11 has been the school's duty class. This means that students have been managing the PE Shed at lunchtimes (Christina, Tamar, Flynn and Pip), being the school office "runner" (Maisie) and Henry and Liam have been helping out in the staff room with dishes ....

Reward for the hard work ..  eating the teachers' morning tea biscuits!
Also this week I have had enormous pleasure marking the "Musical" Learning Styles homework. We have shared videos of students playing, seen photos and drawings of a huge range of "home made" musical instruments - Bella's wrench xylophone looked amazing. I really appreciate the number of parents who shared some of their favourite music with their children (and vice versa of course!). Here's a piece of music composed by Alice. It also sounded fabulous! 
 
In the classroom we've been reading The Highwayman, by Alfred Noyes and I have seen some great story boards recording the key events, with suggestions for actors who could star and theme music that would be appropriate to create the correct atmosphere. With writing this week the students have been working on their character descriptions and one group used the chrome books for this task. I enjoyed learning how to check their work and comment about it along the way. Also starting this week was the extension maths class,so in Room 11 we left statistics and moved onto adding and subtracting!
This morning I have been  visited by various students filming for media studies ...




This week softball didn't "happen" but Long Jump did. The students set up the pit and then got on with the job of completing their jumps. I'll end with some of them in action.

Nina
Jacob - lots of height!
Bhulvhai

Thursday 6 March 2014

Week 5 in Room 11

Another week has gone by since the last posting. There is always so much going on that it is hard to know where to begin but...
Here's a peek at some homework I enjoyed marking this week:

Ellie's Homework
There are many others who are putting both the time and effort into these tasks and I enjoyed looking at the goals that many wanted to achieve.

Our Maths focus so far has been on Statistics. Mid way through the week we had a look back on all the things we felt we had either learnt or revisited and remembered more clearly. Here's a photo of some of the board:
Excuse the handwriting - lots of ideas coming from the class!
 It was so great that every student could add their ideas.
Students from the 2013 Maths extension class and a couple of others have been looking at the nzmaths website and have been doing their own independent investigations:

Room 11 students were involved in the HNI Triathlon on Wednesday. We had a boys' team of Tom R (swim leg), Jacob M (run leg) and Henry W (cycle leg) who went really well to achieve a third. Livy completed the swim leg for the girls' team - along with two others from Room 9 and they came second! After all that exercise you need refuelling ....
Tom and Jacob - recovery mode!

I asked the class to pose for a class photo this morning. There was a bit of complaining because it was right on the morning tea break. As you can see they weren't very enthusiastic!! Maybe next time they will smile a wee bit more.


 And to end this week in a really great way: Congratulations Eli on achieving your Honour's
Badge!!