The World Peace Game

Today we began an ongoing reflection about our experience with the World Peace Game.

Students were asked to consider done of the areas in which they were stretched. They had to consider these (and others that came up as they reflected) using the following questions:

1. What have I learned?
2. How will this help me now and in the future?
3. What will I do about this learning?

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Learning to type

We'd like every student in the secondary school to learn to type - or at least improve their keyboarding skills. Here is a draft for our approach:

1. Learn about correct posture and set up of equipment/space.
2. Home keys - this is critical, ensure no switching of sides!
3. Increasing our expectations for the amount of typing students do - we learn best by doing!
4. Supplementing this with some games and practice of drills to learn the motor skills - some to start you off are below...

List of online tools to practice typing - each student needs to evaluate the below tools at some stage during the next week and place a comment on this blog post with their evaluation of the tool:

1. Typing Club - Reuben and Anna to evaluate
2. Typing Tutor - Olivia and Helena to evaluate
3. Typing Lessons - Reuben and Tyler to evaluate
4. Typing Test - Meg and Jenny to evaluate
5. Typing Test 2 - Helena and Nathan to evaluate

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Totara News - Term 2 Week 7

Kia ora koutou!

The Peace Game has begun! What an amazing opportunity for students to be working together, meeting new people and attempting to solve some of the worlds current issues. Well done everyone, it has been wonderful to see you all bring your skills to the game and be challenged at the same time.

Well done everyone in your use of our new Google Apps system - one of the advantages of these tools is that both Kerry and Rob can ‘see’ what you are up to each week as you learn to use the various tools within it. Please remember to keep everything you wish to share with the class and us inside your individual folder - that way we can give each other feedback and help if needed. We encourage students to log in to show their families how this system works!

Helena sharing her photography blog...

In celebration last week Helena shared her amazing photography blog - here is a photo of her leading the school through this and showcasing her great skills! Well done Helena. Well done also Reuben who is currently leading our school celebrations!

In English and Social Studies this week, we are going to look at where you are all at with your assignments and make sure everyone has the right amount of time and resources to enable them to complete the assignment in a meaningful way. We will do this on Tuesday morning first thing, straight after we have another look at the kids news site that we explored last week. Here is the link if you’d like to explore the site further:

http://www.kiwikidsnews.co.nz

Learning to read an asTTle assessment - to identify next steps...

This week we will introduce you to a tool called Mathletics, which will be used to supplement our maths programme and target the skills you each need to practice. 

Your asTTle maths assessments will be used to personalise the Mathletics activities you do, once you’ve had time to learn and play with the various tools within it of course!

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Rat project- by Anna

The process I went through:
I made a plan of what I wanted to achieve through a brainstorm and then I did a CAF (consider all factors) to check that I had everything.

Anna's Consider All Factors brainstorm...

Then I showed Kerry, Ella and Rob my proposal. (They loved it :)

After that it turned out that two little girl rats were destined to come to us because a few weeks later we got given them from some lovely people who couldn't look after them.

Now they are living happily in the classroom (and at my house in the weekends) with lots of love and cuddles.

This is the presentation of my proposal to the educators to get class rats for my individual project:

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My Individual Project - Helena

Final Reflection - 13/6/2014

1. Where am I at with my project?

• I have shared my project and what I have done with the school.

2. What have I learned about myself?

• I really enjoy photography and web design  

3. What are the skills I have learned?

• Tips with how to take good photos
• how to code a blog

My Blog: http://livelovelaughphotographylife.blogspot.co.nz/

My Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/122864862@N04/

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Totara Newsletter - Term 2 - Week 6

Kia ora koutou!

Firstly we want to warmly welcome Meg to the team. Meg joins us from Miro! We also welcome Nathan from Miro - Nathan is joining us on Thursdays. It's great having you both with us!

Last week’s debate was a great success. Thank you and well done to everyone involved. We will be spending some time on Wednesday to re-watch the debate and analyse how it went. This week is also Peace Game week! We are all really excited to be involved. The sessions will run for three weeks 9:30am - 12:30pm Monday and Thursday. If you have any questions or comments about the Peace Game please let us know and/or refer to this link: www.worldpeacegame.org

In maths this week we are moving from investigating triangles and getting more into angles and properties of other polygons. Students are making some rather complicated 3D polygons as a fun activity - these will be on display as they get finished.

The school recently implemented a new system called Google Apps for Education. This includes an email address for every student in Totara (we are starting with the secondary first), plus an online area for storing and collaborating on documents. You can email your child on his/her address which is in the format: annac@sevenoaks.school.nz. We’d love you to ask your child to show you what they’ve done so far as this will reinforce their learning. This is linked to the Totara Ultranet site, but can also be accessed from any web browser by typing in one of: docs.sevenoaks.school.nz, mail.sevenoaks.school.nz, calendar.sevenoaks.school.nz.

A couple of expectations we have for use of this system include:

1. Parents are able to log in to the student email, documents and other areas of it at any time. Students may change their password as long as their parent(s) and educators are informed what this is.
2. Any aspect of the system - emails, chat, Google Plus, documents can be monitored at any time. We do however work in a high trust environment where we expect all online work/communication to be appropriate to learning and respectful at all times.
3. As more of our work and learning moves online, we will be exploring various cyber citizenship issues such as plagiarism, safety, managing our online identity/digital footprint, passwords and sharing information and so on.

If you have any questions please email us.

Nga mihi,

Kerry, Rob and Ella

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Maths Challenge - Throwing A Dice

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Heat Transfer Investigation

Today in Science the challenge is to identify the best insulator and the best conductors from a range of items, using this investigation process...

Here are some shots of the challenge in action...

Questions for students to reflect on (and record ideas to in the comments below...):

1. What is the difference between an insulator and a conductor?
2. How might you improve the investigation?
3. Why do you think scientists sometimes investigate the same issue using a range of different approaches and methods?
4. Anything else you can think of... ;-)

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Building Brilliance - What is the Human Spirit?

Today we reflected on the question What is the human spirit? as part of the start to our day.

Part of this is to consider the place of a new assessment tool we are using called e-asTTle, which is essentially a testing and assessment tool.

Students had to record their ideas on the following aspects:

1. Consider what they think the human spirit is...

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