Today we started asking some questions about what the Treaty of Waitangi is and what it means for us today. (We know - it's a BIG topic!) Today we started by writing down what we already know and what we need to find out.
We sorted out what were 'skinny' questions and which were 'chunky' questions. Here is a recording of some of our best questions - both skinny and chunky.
Can you think of other questions that would help us understand why Maori are 'tangata whenua' of NZ?
It's great to hear about the learning that is continuing at home! I always encourage parents to allow their children to have a small amount of time during the week to use the internet as a homework tool. Studyladder, for example, has set tasks I've chosen for them and also gives them instant feedback about how they are going - it even has instructional videos for when they get stuck. Have a look with your student and ask them to show you around the site!
Also - great to see some early birds returning their Y6 Young Leaders slips to the office. Nice work! Be even better to see the parent helpers slips arriving too. It's going to be a great 2 days. (Copied from our News and Views in the Newsletter)
This term we are going to make our first Lapbooks! Here's a link to give some great ideas of how we can use them to help our inquiry about 'NZ History.'
Remember - the research and creation is part of our classroom programme. It would a good use of your time at home to work on the presentation. have fun and BE CREATIVE!
Are you inspired by our posters? These were made using bighugelabs.com and we made them while practising our team work skills. We would love some comments! How could we get better at working in teams?
Welcome back to a new term everyone - especially parents and family friends. Here are a few of the things we did today to kick start a lot of new skills and inquiries for the term.
This afternoon we had a tuning in session for our unit on weight and capacity. Each team had to estimate any material as accurately as they could to 500 grams. Here are some of the efforts below but there were some groups that used water and were very close!
This group found a discus that had the weight written on it! Very clever...except they forgot to take the weight of the cup into account. Doh! So close.
We learned that the first people started using water as a common weighing material because everyone had it and it was easy to compare. We discovered that 1 ml of water equals 1 gram of weight - so that means 500mls is the same weight as 500 grams. Clever.
We also started a new CSI unit on 'synthesizing' today. CSI is what we are using to discover new strategies for reading comprehension. This text, "Black Beauty" helped us learn that the key words we know or don't know can be important when helping us summarise a text. We want to better at this when we're reading independently! Ask us to explain what synthesizing is...
We also looked at our 'learning words' for the week - doing my best. This animation about a determined kiwi gave us some thoughts about striving for our best effort in everything we do. Tomorrow we'll be setting some goals that will give us something to aim for!
Lastly - our 'Nothing Much' movie was featured on a national education website, 'Core Education's' blog. This was quite an honour for us - it was great seeing some positive feedback from other teachers and educators via their comments, too.
If you didn't see this it would be well worth your time to watch. I hope it gives you a little insight into our day and how busy we 'really are!'
How are your skills projects going? On Wednesday we will be filming you showing off your skills for our 'Kauri show-off' movie! Keep up the practice and you hopefully won't look like this!
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)