Last week in Halberg

It was a big week last week, with our move into the new 'Kepler' space. This week we will be sharing this space with the rest of Sprint and Mrs Taylor's Stride class.

Here are a couple of project options that we will be working on this week:

1. “Christmas Around the World” Multimedia Presentations (Using Google Slides)
Mrs Taylor's Information about Christmas around the world

2. The Twelve Days of Christmas Acts of Kindness Contract (Write and sign your own)
Traditional Twelve Days of Christmas Song
Shrek's 12 days of Christmas
Kiwi Version: A Pukeko in a Punga tree

3. Chalk and stencil Art 

Poem Inspiration

Today we are going to use the poem 'Budapest' by Billy Collins as our inspiration for our own poetry or story.

Summer Water Safety Competition

With so many families planning to spend time in, on or around water in the holidays, let’s promote water safety before the summer season gets into full swing.

The winner of this three week competition will receive $100 towards swimming lessons at a Quality Swim School or a SNZ affiliated swim club. 

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Gettingpreparedforsummer

This competition also raises another important issue about giving out personal information online. What could we do, so that we can still enter the competition?
What information is compulsory?
What are the Terms and Conditions?

How to write a limerick?

http://www.poetry4kids.com/blog/lessons/how-to-write-a-limerick/

Book character day

Book Parade

Stop, drop and read

Today was stop, drop and read day... The bell rang in the middle of maths this afternoon... This is what happened: 

Sports dress up day!

The Narrative Song

What are the chances?

Here are a couple of probability statistics warm up games we'll be playing this week:

The Vile Vendor

Random or Not

Thanks Statistics NZ

Halberg's New Flag

Thanks Charlie for sharing your idea for a Halberg flag. What do you think?

What's your angle?

For the next two weeks we are going to be looking at angles and geometry. These great videos from mathantics are a great introduction to some new ideas.

Writing Inspiration

A 14-year-old photographer has taken the internet by storm with his creative and dreamlike images that make normal-sized people appear tiny. 

Zev Hoover, from Natick, Massachusetts, goes by the Flickr username Fiddle Oak, a play on 'little folk', which adequately describes the incredible images that make up his 'miniature world'. 

Thanks to Literacy Shed

Here is his website: http://fiddleoak.com

Maybe One Morning...

"Crunch" went the leaves under his foot. "Creak" went the bolts in the street sign above

him, as he walked to the bus stop on a cold and frosty morning. Alex wondered why there

was nobody at his bus stop. He stood proudly in his new shoes. When he remembered the

old shoe salesman's warning: "Never get these wet " he said suspiciously. Followed by a

creepy cough. A loud shatter woke him from his daydream. Alex looked behind him and saw

a trail of floating objects along where he had walked. Just then the bus pulled up. Alex didn't

know what to do, so on autopilot he got on the bus as usual. The driver put his foot on the

accelerator and the old rusty machine whirred to life. Alex could feel the bus heaters on the back of

his ankles as the rickety vehicle slowly floated up to the height of the tall fur trees then as the

bus descended the old man turned around and yelled in a deep voice " I told you not to

get those shoes wet " followed by a creepy cough.

Community Time: Managing Impulsivity

Here are the poster we made in Community Time today. Well done Ika-tere what an awesome supportive and thinking bunch of Springston kids!

READING: Relevant and Irrelevant Information

This week we will be using this website to practise identifying irrelevant information:

http://www.studyzone.org/mtestprep/math8/d/relevantp.cfm

http://esl.fis.edu/learners/read/irrelev3.htm

Life without geometry is point-less!

From this week we are going to be investigating 2D, 3D shapes, lines and angles. Here are some useful links we will use over the weeks:

  Maths is fun - geometry - solid geometry

Ever wondering where those funny sounding names like icosahedron came from:  Greek Prefixes



This video contains some pretty tricky geometry, we will just be looking at the first 2 minutes.

Expand Vocabulary: Dictionary or Thesaurus

Blogging It with Room 22

This week we are going to start blogging with Whaea Alice's friend's class Mrs Barbour and Room 22 at St Albans School in Christchurch. Here are their blogging topics for the week:

Halberg can post their answers on their own blogs please.
Make your blog post title Blogging It.
http://room22blogginit.weebly.com/

Week 5 Writing topics:
* Who am I? (What makes me the unique and special person that I am? What are the special things I like and do that make me who I am? Remember to use "because... because")
* Describe the oldest person you know. (Make sure you use interesting sentence starters, as well as your 5 senses to make you writing more interesting).
* Dear Alien, let me tell you about Earth 

The Earth is a Puzzle: Key Word Vocabulary Exercise

ICT Maths

Put yourselves to the test this week before you go onto Studyladder set tasks:

complete 10 questions on http://tablestest.com/

'Comet' Sighting

There has been a reported sighting of an unknown, unfamiliar object. Sightings confirm the creature is small and orange...

Lesson #2 Phases of the Moon

What is Gravity? What effect does it have on our Earth?

1. What is gravity?


2. What effect does the moon's gravity have on Earth?

3. Ok, so how do seasons work?

What's your weight on the moon?

Here's an extra challenge for Halberg this week: 

Calculate what your weight would be on the moon (using the instructions below) and leave a comment. 

 Also how much would your cat or dog weigh on the moon? 

iConnect: Moon Lesson #1

1. The earth, moon and sun system


2. Kiwi Kids Science: Moon Facts

3. Kiwi Kids Science: first-moon-landing video

What are Fractions?

Bravo

Alpha


Comparing decimals: ordering from least to greatest: This is a fun example where we reorder decimals from smallest to largest. You're looking for the place value that is the most signifiant, and then working backwards.

Halberg Sprinters 's Photo on Wednesday, 24 June 2015

Volume (Millilitres and Cubic centimetres)

Newspaper Articles

Volume, Capacity, Mass

Volume:



Mass

Navigate the Newspaper Challenge

This week in reading we have started to investigate Newspapers.

On Thursday we are going to put our learning to the test with the wickED 'Navigate the Newspaper' challenge.

Step up, Step up, Read all about it!

This week in reading, we are going to be taking a closer look at newspapers, both in print and online as well as local, national and international.

Here are some links to online news providers:

Kiwi Kids News from NZ

Dogo news from America

National Geographic for Kids

Persuade Me! Challenge

WOW... I guess we'll have to wait until Monday to find out who won and what they have won..


Persuade Me! on PhotoPeach

Halberg Sprinters 's Post on Thursday, 4 June 2015

More great home learning presentation this week. Zac taught us about Wolves, Anna shared her art and Sam profiled some big name Rugby players. Check out their blogs where we can embed their presentations for you to enjoy again. Jack S has already uploaded his. Click on his blog link on the left side bar.

Halberg Sprinters 's Post on Thursday, 4 June 2015

Here is pep the bear, looking very colourful and covered in positive pep talks! Can you read any of them? Do you know any more positive peps? Leave a comment.

Three Little Pigs By Roald Dahl

Good Sentences into Better Sentences

This week we are working on making good sentences into better sentences. Starting with the vocabulary we use:  verbs 



and Adjectives 

Halberg Sprinters 's Video on Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Inference Riddles

We have been concentrating on inference and digging deeper into our understanding in Reading at the moment. Check out these tricky 'inference riddles' to get you thinking:

101 Inference Riddles

Lego, lego, lego

We love build with chrome! Today we had our first session experimenting with build with chrome - build master courses! Great problem solving and working together! 

ANZAC Freeze Frames

This friday, after our ANZAC Assembly we spent some time reading (The Bantam and the Soldier) and discussing what life in the trenches would have been like. We have seen a lot of time this week looking at photographs from the Gallipoli Campaign so today we used our knowledge of drama elements: space, and focus to create a series of freeze frames.

Make a comment below and tell us what you think of our freeze frames. Can you see the different parts of trench life we showed in our freeze frames? 

ANZAC Reading

Here are some interesting links related to the ANZAZ reading for the 'Judy Blume' group and anyone else who is interested in reading more about the ANZACs.

http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/mascots/first-world-war-mascots
This site discusses 4 dogs that were mascots during WW1

http://ww100.govt.nz/pigeons-of-war
This site explains how pigeons were used as messengers during the war.

http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/video/bess-horse-great-war-story
This contains a video and article detailing how horses were involved in the war. It also gives information about Bess one of four horses that returned to NZ after the war.

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/dogs_in_world_war_one.html
This site describes the many uses of dogs during the war. They were involved as messengers, sentries, casualty support and scouts.

Maths strategy lessons

Check out what Jaimee and I created this afternoon in maths. Watch this space - there wil lbe plenty more of this next term...

Maths Groups - what does it all mean?

Check out where our new numeracy group names come from:

NATO phonetic alphabet

iConnect Art update

I was really impressed this week with the positive attitude and artistically articulate students in Halberg (try saying that ten times fast....). Check out the progress on our mixed media digital portraits:

Blogging!

On Fridays, we have 'modules' where each class has three different lessons with three different teachers over the day. Fridays are quickly becoming favourite day - jam packed with new learning and energy!!

I am teaching an Communication, Collaboration and Blogging unit. Over the past three weeks we have investigated how we can communicate online and how to do that responsibly and appropriately. All of sprint have practised logging into their google accounts and managing their folders and, in Halberg, their own blog.

These blogs are set up as part of each student's google account and provide a 'sharing space' where students can publish work, share ideas and connect with others. So far we have learnt how to log on, make a new post and insert a picture.

The links to our blogs are on the left hand side of this blog (see Student Blogs) and will only 'go live' once we have drafted and checked our first posts. Please have a look and make a comment on our work so far.

Our next step is to work on commenting... watch this space.

What is a citizen?

Where are you a citizen? What makes a good citizen? What are citizen's rights and responsibilities? What is a digital citizen? These are some some of the questions we are going to explore for the rest of the term. 

Here are some helpful links to get us thinking: 

Be a digital citizen - watch this video and record some of the key ideas and key words. Write a comment with what you find. 

iConnect Art

This week we will be creating some portrait art using a digital photograph as our base. I found the idea on an Art Blog. I used this sketch website (Photofunia.com) to turn a digital photo into a black and white sketch. Like this:

What does a digital citizen have to think about?

This week, we have started discussing what it means to be a citizen, particularly in the digital world.

Today we are going to use an interactive quiz, to refresh our memories on some of the issues we have to think about when working in the 'digital world.

Here's the link: Privacy Pirates

How do you learn?

We are going to use this survey to get to know our class AND learn more about statistics and data-gathering.

Here is the summary of responses so far: How do Halberg learn best?

What graphs are used to display this data? 

What did you learn about your classmates?

What could we do to improve Halberg for our learning style? 

Thanks to studyladder for the idea and questions.

iConnect with Citizenship

This year our inquiry theme is iConnect. It's a clever sentence starter for "I connect..." 

We started the topic by trying to connect these hexagons. I think we did a great job about linking together these ideas and concepts.  For the rest of the week, we are going to work on 'iConnect Digital' or "I connect as a digital citizen" 

The book with no pictures by B. J. Novak

We read this book yesterday in our first reading session for the year. Here is a video of part of the book being read by it's author B. J. Novak.

There is more than 1 way to read a book:

Pass the Pep Talk

Last year some of us learnt about being bucket fillers, this year it's all about the pep talk. The definition of a pep talk is above but I think the best way to describe it is to hear one: 

Apart from being funny and good dancer the kid president has some pretty cool things to say:

If life is a game, aren't we all on the same team?

Don't stop believing unless your dream is stupid...then you should just get a better dream. 

What will you create when you make the world awesome? 

This is our time.

We can cry about it, or we can dance about it. 

You were made to be awesome.

Do you agree with what he says?

What would you say to someone in your pep talk? 

Can our A+ goals be good pep talks? 

2015: A change is as good as a holiday!

Nau mai Haere Mai

You might have noticed a few changes... over the next few days and weeks I (Whaea Alice) will be changing quite a few things around on the blog - including it's name! It's almost the start of a new school year and we will have so much more to share and show on our blogs this year so I'm making some space.

Luckily this blog is not like my teacher's cupboard and it's never too full and I don't have to throw anything out!
Team Truffula  if you are looking for our WOW work page or your Kids Blogs, the links are now at the bottom of the right hand column under '2014 Pages'.

See you all soon,

Whaea Alice