Week 6 Term 3 2008

This week we produced our first voice thread. It was so exciting as we pretended that our classroom was a recording studio and we were as quiet as we could be as everyone took a turn to read their personal recount of flying their parachute.

We have explored the differences between parachutes and hot air balloons and as a class organised our thoughts using a Venn diagram. (click on the image below to enlarge it)

To show our developing understanding of the differences between parachutes and hot air balloons we drew them on kidpix. BubbleShare: Share photos - Create and Share Crafts

Next week we will complete a Venn diagram by ourselves using a template on the computer. Look at Jude and Ciaran’s work below.(click on the image to enlarge it) Ciaran



Jude



We are all gaining confidence in using the class camera – with most of us being able to turn it on and off as well as zoom in and out. This week we took a photo of a dump truck which Dylan kindly got for us from room 4.

As a result of reading our shared book ‘The bus ride’ we have begun to explore the use of simple animations using kidpix. While on the bus Grandpa and Tom play a game of eye spy we decided to try out our ever increasing skills on kidpix by building up a picture based on a letter of the alphabet. We hope to do some more of these next week. So look out for them on next weeks blog.

On Tuesday we took part in the schools mini Olympics which was a lot of fun. Juwon was our official photographer. She captured the images below as we watched the opening ceremony and took part in the games

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Week 5 Term 3 2008

This week has been another busy week in room 5. We have continued to explore our inquiry journeys near and far by looking at why people might want to go to watch the Olympics. We recording our ideas on a mind map (click on image below to enlarge it)



Then we discussed how we could improve this mind map with images. All but one came from the symbols within the inspiration programme with only one being dragged from google images. We were happy with the final product below. ( click on the image to enlarge it)



More individual class members have begun to independently use the inspiration programme to share their knowledge of bikes. It's exciting to watch 6 and 7 year old children use this programme for the very first time. (click on the images below to enlarge them)

Ashley


Ciaran


Ellisha


Elly


Hayden


Liam


We explored one of the thinker’s keys this week and were delighted with the number of things we thought you could do with an old car tyre. Once again we discussed how we could make our work more eye catching which saw us look at google images.(click on the image to enlarge it)




As we explored google images – we were fascinated in the ways people are actually using old tyres from retaining walls, to jandals,to a sculpture of a horse

This week we wrote about flying our parachutes last Friday and these are on display in our room. We collected facts on hot air balloons and organised these using a y chart, we then used our y charts to write an information report on hot air balloons. We continue to make our own paper Mache hot air balloons which involves our hands getting rather messy.





We completed our art work using the close up photos we each took with the class camera.

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This week we all used the class camera to take a photo of a toy helicopter. This image will be used next week as we write poems about helicopters.

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Week 4 Term 3 2008

This week was ‘maths week’ and as a class we participated in a range of maths related activities run within the school. Daily we took part in an estimation challenge that everyone in the school took part in. On Tuesday we had to estimate how far a bean bag could be thrown. ‘Mike’ the man who was putting up the new classroom blinds listened with interest as we discussed our estimations. We took the opportunity to talk to him about how he used ‘maths’ in his work. He told us he uses maths everyday as he measures the length of the windows and works out where to place the blinds. He asked us to estimate the length of our new blind. Thanks Mike for taking an interest in our estimation challenge and sharing your knowledge with us.



On Friday when our buddy class visited we played maths games together.


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Our shared book this week was called ‘Parachuting’. This led us to explore the advantages and disadvantages of parachuting.(click on the image to enlarge it)



On Friday we made parachutes using plastic bags. We worked in pairs – working and supporting each other. When there was a break in the weather we took our parachutes out into the playground and flew them which was great fun.

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It is pleasing to see some of our class members using the programme inspiration to share their knowledge of bikes. (click on the image to enlarge it.)






We have used the close up photos we took as motivation for this weeks art. Below is Ellisha’s work – Look out for everybody’s work which will be posted on the blog next week

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We have also looked at some sites about hot air balloons and found this great video.



Click on the link to watch a video from HowStuffWorks that explains how Hot air balloons work

Week 3 Term 3 2008

This week we have tried to extend our thinking in creative ways by using the thinkers keys related to transport. We started with the alphabet key – as we already had an example of this in our room. We thought about all the things we could think of related to transport and journeys near and far. For some letters this proved quite challenging. Mrs Sneddon came in to work with the class – and we told her about the letters we were having difficulty with. The next day we found a note on the whiteboard. It was great that Mrs Sneddon shared her knowledge with us.



Mrs Sneddon had suggested gondola for g and overlander for o. Some of us didn’t know what these were so we went on to the internet to have a look. Liam shared he’d been on a gondola in Queenstown so we used google and typed in gondola Queenstown and pressed images. We found a picture of the gondola Liam had been on. We did the same for overlander. We found the overlander is the train that goes between Auckland and Wellington. When we went on to the site we found it takes 12 hours to travel between the two cities and cost $288 each way for an adult and child. We thought this was quite expensive.
We wondered what it would cost to go by other forms of transport.




We used a table to organise and store all our information.(click on the imag above to enlarge) With all our letters sorted we decided we would present our findings using kidpix. Everyone was assigned a letter and the drawing began. Below is our work.

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We also investigated the question key. The answer was traffic light, we had to think of what the question might have been.(click on the image to enlarge it)





The last key we investigated was the interpretation key. We came up with some very interesting reasons why there were no cars on the road.( click on the image to enlarge it)







This weeks shared book was called ‘Going to Grandpa’s. We used a table to organise our thoughts about why the family had gone to see Grandpa and why they chose to go by car. (click on the image to enlarge it)



Finally this week , for art we have been working on completing our bike pictures using interesting combinations of colours. Some of this work will be displayed in the library.


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We have also looked at some interesting photos taken of parts of bikes. We had a go ourselves and below you can see our work.



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Week 2 Term 3 2008

This week we finished a class matrix that explored where we had gone in the holidays, how we’d got there and why. We then looked at our matrix and discovered most of us had gone on journeys close to home. We came up with the following reasons why-
- it didn’t cost too much for petrol
- it is quick to get to places close to home
- when you go close to home you can sometimes take a friend.
Most of us had gone by car and had gone somewhere for fun or to see family and friends.


We brainstormed the different types of transport we could think of. (click on the image to make it bigger)


We decided this was hard to read so we thought about how we could organise our ideas by grouping similar things together by colour. Once we had done that we discovered the symbol bar on inspiration and added graphics to our work. Below is our final work.(click on the image to make it bigger)




We also designed some questions to investigate related to the Olympics.
Where is Beijing? How are people travelling to the Olympics? Why are people travelling from one country to another JUST to go to the Olympics?


This week we have read the book Grandma’s bicycle – a book we loved as a lovely character Fred fixed all of Grandma’s problems eg when the sun shone and made grandma hot Fred attached a fan to the bike, when it rained we attached an umbrella. We made a display in our room about it.




We have used kidpix to label the photos of the bike we took last week. We will used these as diagram at the bottom of the information reports on bikes we are currently writing.

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As promised below are the bikes we drew using kidpix – these proved quite tricky to do.
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Also see below the observational sketches we have done of a tricycle, bicycle or scooter.

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