FORT DAY!!!!!!

Wet day? Kids distracted by lightning? Need help?

Why not build forts with your students. Who said a class needs to have a normal layout? and what is a normal layout anyway!

Room 9 had heaps of fun building their forts and were the quietest I think they have ever been. Think of the benefits for their learning when they feel comfortable and safe.

Through Space and TIme!

This term room 9 has been investigating space and planetary systems. They have done a tone of work and it has been great seeing these budding scientists learn about the complexities of space and planetary systems. During this process Room 9 students were given a goal of presenting their findings to the class. Some however chose a different approach to presentation. Above you will find our space video, a first attempt by room 9 to make a educational video. Below you can see some of the photos from our presentations and displays that were created. Well done to Room 9 students for their participation special shout our to Leray for his amazing book on space which he created.

Ako Hiko Film Festival Entry

Room 9's film festival entry

For the last two months Room 9 has been in the process of shooting and editing it's film for the Ako Hiko film Festival. Please view and let us know what you think. Room 9 has done really well to film a quality film and have done a lot of learning around how films are made. It was a great collaborative project and was a lot of fun. Highly recommended for any Ako Hiko schools to participate in the future!

Welcome to Virtual reality!

During the school holiday's Mr Walker went to the Sydney Edtech Conference hosted by google. He came back to class after this with a range of tools to share with room 9. He showed us google experiments which are awesome and have some great tools to experiment with. Sematris is our favourite so far. However he also came back with a cool new way to share our work through virtual reality tours.

https://sites.google.com/wesleyintermediate.school.nz/thevrroom/wesley-intermediate-school-virtual-reality/classroom-tours/ingrid?authuser=0

Check out our cool virtual reality tours! We have started with our recounts from our holidays.

Rockets @ Wesley Primary

Today room 9 had a wonderful opportunity to go and demonstrate our rocket programme at Wesley primary school. We partnered up with room 3 & 4, who have been studying flight this term. We talked about the different forces acting on the rocket and we also introduced newtons laws to the class. We then gave a demonstration of a rocket in flight and gave room 3 & 4 a chance to have a go at launching the rocket.

 Both classes were really involved and showed a great understanding of how flight is achieved. They were able to talk about thrust, lift, drag and how friction affects our rockets flight. Some great connections were made, and it was a real pleasure linking up with Wesley Primary for a demonstration.

Graphic art Linking to our Writing

Graphic art is an awesome art form and is something that can be done using the tools we have on Google. After our lesson in writing Room 9 has looked at ways we could display our work and one fun area was to look at how to use google drawing in order to make graphic art style posters that we could display our writing on. Today we have all had a go at the process it takes in order to create cool graphic art and there has been some great results. Have a look at our Model below created by Mr Walker, and then below that is some of the other students attempts at this.

Week 8 Term 2 2018

This week Room 9 has been working on how to craft a narrative story, and with their high level of narrative structure knowledge I thought it would be cool to take them through a different approach than just using the story mountain template (which is good but also limits the complexities of a narrative story sometimes). So Room 9 has looked at the stages of a hero based off of Joseph Campbells famous book "The Hero with a thousand faces".

We have used the template below to help plan out an intricate story about a girl named Millie who lives on Uranus in a desert city whose main source of export is sand and water (collected from Cacti). The template we have used is the fundamental structure for almost all movies involving a hero (Think Star Wars, Avengers, Harry Potter etc...) and was great fun for the students to learn how to piece together a hero's adventure. We also added the visual aspect of creating a (rough) map of the trail our hero must take in order to return to her ordinary world. A highly recomended task for adept students who want to go beyond standard graphic organisers and really look at how hero's are created.