Friday August 21st

Innovative Learning Environments

Over the last two Fridays, Miss Ward has set us tasks over a certain amount of time that we have to complete.  This means we can pick and choose when we do the work as long as we are balancing our time, to ensure we are getting all the work done.  The tasks we have had to do are maths, reading and writing work.  All tasks are related to what we are learning about in class.  Some of us have been really good at managing our time to get our work done and some people have had to have Miss Ward reminding them to manage their time.  We love having choice about when we can do our work, it is cool to see people doing different work at the same time.  Miss Ward only lets us choose when we do our work for a certain block of time at the moment, e.g. the first or second morning block.  Miss Ward also pulls out people to work with over this time for reading, maths or writing.  This is part of an Innovative Learning Environment as we are able to choose when we do our work, instead of being told (well most of us can!).

Here are some photos of us choosing when we get our work done:

The Totallies maths group doing their maths with Miss Ward.

Maddie, Julienne and George doing XtraMath.

Nick and Iara doing their maths.

Courtney doing her Quick Write.

Esther doing her reading work.

Iara and Nic doing SumDog.

Cooper doing Rainbow Reading for guided reading with Miss Ward.

George doing his Quick Write.

Courtney doing her reading work.

Chloe doing her maths.

George doing guided reading with Miss Ward

Monday August 3rd

Writing

Today Miss Ward introduced something called a 'Quick Write' to us.  The idea of a quick write is to help us get better at writing because to get better we have to write!  Miss Ward and Miss Chapman have to teach us how to write different genres like reports and recounts, but sometimes we just need to practice writing. Our quick writes go for six minutes and the idea of it is that we write quietly for six minutes on a given topic. Today we had to write a list of things we did at the weekend. Miss Ward modelled to us what she wanted us to do through the Apple TV then it was our turn.  We had to make sure our lists had fullstops at the end of each sentence, had capitals in the right places and we started our sentences with a range of sentence starters.  After that we shared our writing with a buddy as sharing can help motivate us to write and it also helps with our oral language.  Quick writes will help us increase how much we write as well.  We will be doing quick writes each day on a range of topics that the class will get to suggest ideas for and in a variety of ways e.g. lists, paragraphs, sentences.  As the old saying goes...practice makes perfect!

Check out some photos of us below doing our quick writes...gosh we are focused!

Everyone focused on their quick writes.

More focused learners in the Middle Room!

This is the example of what we had to do.

Georgia working on her list.

George busy thinking while Esther works on her list.

Focused Middle Roomers!

Some of the team working on the desktop computers.