Week 5 Term 3 2014

Another great week in Room 6, however it is hard to believe how fast our term is going!

On Tuesday I had a New Entrant have his first visit and it is amazing the different stages that students start school at - with some not being ready, some needing a few weeks to get use to routines and school life and some who are ready to go. I feel that it would be beneficial to New Entrant teachers if there was a preschool programme in place to help the transition to school not only easier on students but the teacher and their parents/caregivers.

On Wednesday I was out of the class for a maths course and my students went to cross country - my class did well with everyone having a go. We even got some places!!

For maths I have been doing addition/subtraction and my students are progressing well. My maths calendar is helping students to learn their numbers up to 100 and then they are using this in their group work. I attended a maths course on fractions and other strands so I look forward to trialing some of the ideas I got.

In writing I am continuing to work with mixed ability needs based groups. This is working really well and students are moving through each part quickly. I have been using free choice seating and this is putting the ownership over on to my students to make good choices. Their writing is still maintaining a high standard so I am pleased about that. We had Lisa in from Te Toi Tupu maths on Thursday afternoon and she went over a great wee activity to boost students oral language and help with sentence structure. I will let you know more once I have had a go with my class.

Reading is continuing well. I have a huge focus on high frequency words at the moment and will be testing some students at the end of week 7 to see if it has made a difference. Students have been using their poetry books to help increase their fluency. I just have to make sure that I throughly teach each nursery rhyme so they are confident by the time it comes to doing it by themselves. During the week my class was also approved a Reading Eggs subscription through until the end of the year which I am really pleased about because they love it and it is helping build on phonics concepts.

Inquiry has been focused on the planets and you can view the learning activities on my latest post. Next week we are looking at different forms of transport.

Planets - our week 5 inquiry

This week we have been studying about planets.
Monday we started by watching a video about planets after this video we talked about what we know about them. With a buddy students then came up with 2 questions they may like to find out about planets.
Tuesday we started exploring some of the planets. Children were interested to find out how planets were made and I found it hard to describe so I made up a solar system in a container (water and glitter) and explained that the glitter is like dust and dirt and it slowly attaches to each other making a planet.

I then gave students a booklet that has each planet and a sentence about them. We discussed the features and then students coloured them to match. One student was interested in finding out about craters so together we did some research that help him answer his questions.

Thursday we found out about who discovered the planets and who visits them. The boys were pretty excited about astronauts and we watched a short video about astronauts landing on the moon - I decided to venture down the astronaut path for a writing topic.

On Friday we had our planets craft day. Student were then given a cut paste activity where they were required to order the planets.

We also did our Astronaut Application - but haven't finished them (will do this on Monday as part of writing).

I thought this was a cute idea and a good way to incorporate literacy through our inquiry. If you would like this document you can download it from my google docs.

Then for the afternoon we made some planets using shaving foam and dye. They turned out really good. See below for step by step photos:

1. We added shaving foam and dye (before hand we had a discussion about shave foam and what/who uses it).

2. Next we mixed it together with a popsicle stick.

3. We pushed our piece of paper down into the mix and left it to dry.

4. We scraped the excess foam off with a ruler and then cut it out

5. We lined them up in order from the sun and pretended we were astronauts blasting off to space.

A close up of the final product.

Maths course - fractions and other strands

Today I attended my last maths course. Our focus for the day was mainly fractions. For the previous 2 courses we had a different lecturer, she was away today and we had a a lady filling in - I was a bit disappointed as she wasn't as organised and was teaching from another persons plan - still she had a huge wealth of knowledge and I appreciate what I did learn. Through discussions with other teachers I did learn a lot of great ideas about games and activities to use with my students.

I find that these course are really great for breaking down the knowledge that students need at each stage and what they will be learning. When I think to my class their are lot of teachable moments that I could incorporate fractions below are several that I will use:

- cutting our fruit in schools up 1/2 and 1/4

- splitting groups up into fractions of sets

- using our bodies to make fractions

Below are some photos of stages etc

Our course facilitator also informed us that they JAM assessment has been revised and is currently being printed for use in schools. It is also being made into a pack pre-made so it can be used straight away so I am looking forward to that coming out. 

Poetry to increase fluency

This week in Room 6 I have introduced a new aspect to our daily poetry. Students in my class all have a poetry book which is full of simple nursery rhymes and poems. I have given them a tracking sheet each where they are required to read each poem five times within the week - their buddy that they read to then has to sign off that they have listened to them. Today was our first day of it, so far so good! In the article I read a teacher implemented this into her class to increase students fluency level.

Week 4 Term 3 2014

Another busy week in Room 6.

Monday was business as usual. I had a big portion of boys away so that changed the dynamics a bit.

Tuesday I had my appraisal meeting with my principal where we discussed my current goals and personal inquiry.

Wednesday my mentor teacher came in and observed me taking a math's lesson. It went pretty well and we discussed how math's calendar etc is going. Math's calendar is something I find a bit harder in a composite class.

My mentor teacher went on an inquiry course the previous week and we spent some time talking about options and paths that I could take for my inquiry. This is something I have been thinking about any way as I feel my inquiry topics go for to long. I am going to change them to short 1 week - 2 weeks in length. Next week we are starting an inquiry into the planets.

For the rest of Wednesday I had PRT release and it was so great crossing some of the items off my to-do list.

Making applesauce

On Friday my class made homemade applesauce in class. I found the idea on another blog and thought what a great idea to talk about following instructions and making sure our writing is in the correct sequence. We got to practice a variety of skills in such a fun and engaging activity. The students loved to help cook the applesauce and we worked on writing, reading, and math skills in the process. 

My students walked in to see the anchor chart and crock pot. Immediately they were curious. We started the morning going around sharing what ingredients we thought we were going to need and how we thought we would make applesauce.
We also had a brief mini lesson on different types of text. I brought out a cookbook and asked them if they knew what it was. 

We discussed how chefs need to follow a recipe when they cook something.
Ingredients:
10 large cooking apples: peeled, sliced and diced (I was lucky and had Ben on the job of prepping the apples last night.)
2 cup of water
1 cup of white sugar
As a class we then read the recipe and measured out and added the ingredients to the crockpot. 

Once we added everything we left it to rest.Throughout the day I let my students stir the ingredients (supervised and from my observation not many students know how to use a wooden spoon to mix) we used adjectives to describe the way the room smelled when we came back in after lunch, the way the applesauce looked, and we talked about what was happening in the crockpot. I used an interval timer so they knew when it was their turn to stir it.

We also wrote a sequence of events of our applesauce. I let my kids lead the conversation and then they wrote it themselves.

Then around 2.30pm we enjoyed tasting our apple sauce. It would have been delicious with ice-cream but I didn't think that far ahead - some children still had three servings!

You can follow this link to a copy of my applesauce document I just printed one for each child and displayed it on their writing wall.

Rakau sticks

This week in Room 6 we have been doing some maori stick games. I played my students a beat and they had to repeat it back to me. They then had a go at making up their own and playing it to a partner. Quite a good way to build up rhythm and work on listening skills.