A day in the life of room 1

Welcome back to school Woodford and hello all of you new year 4 students in Mrs Hardie's class. You will be getting to know us all a lot better over the coming weeks and months. I hope that you all had a great summer? We are hoping to use your summer holiday as a collaborative project over the next few weeks, but Mrs Hardie will tell you more about that.

Here at Meadowbank, we have been working hard on a project to show you what a day in our class is like. We shot the following film over a week and a half, but we chose all the things that make being a student at Meadowbank special. We tried to think of the kinds of things that make our school day, or the way that we are in school different from the way that we think you might be in school at Woodford. We all do Literacy and Maths and those kinds of lessons, so we tried to show you some of the other lessons that we do.

Look at our video and see what you can see that makes our school day different from yours. Let us know by posting comments. If there some parts of our school day that you want more information on, please use the comments for that too.

We made the movie using Timer Shot and a web cam, so the quality is not good, but you get the idea. We hope that you like it!

There are still a few items that we are planning to video, so this version will be updated. So keep an eye out for our updates.

Where in the World is Meadowbank?

The following is a short clip showing just where in the world we are! Now that we have moved to Blogspot we can show our video in all its glory! Thanks again to Dan Hess and the Stray Relay for the backing track!

Robotics at Meadowbank

We have a robotics G+T group at Meadowbank, it has only just started this term and the equipment is new to us. The students have to complete the challenge at the following wiki .

Do you have any RCX or NXT Lego sets at Woodford? We hope that you do, because one of the things that we are hoping to do with you is to create a joint robot that we can program collaboratively! (Maybe if you wish to take part in the Robozone challenge you could use this wiki as a starting point? Or maybe you could set up a challenge for us to complete?) The majority of our robo engineers are from year 4 and as you can see from the images below, there are quite a few girls in the group. This is because the focus of this project is not about building with Lego bricks but about problem solving especially being stuck. The students are celebrating every time that they get stuck, because when they are stuck they then have a problem to solve! To solve a problem they first have to identify the problem and break it down into smaller easier to solve problems. As the students solve each little piece of the puzzle they end up solving the bigger problem and then move on to find the next bigger challenge!

We will keep posting images and keep you posted of our progress as we move through term 3.

This album is powered by BubbleShare - Add to my blog

The Alphabet Project

Our art G+T students have spent term 2 working with Mrs Jackson and with a little help from Mr Kinane, on a digital camera project. The idea originated from several books that we have in school, in addition, the students were shown the following flickr tool to help them really get into the idea. The students had to scour our school environment for environmental print. They had to find examples of letters or shapes in the environment that looked like a letter and then photograph them. Once the best ones were selected the students then had to edit them in a programme called The Gimp, which is a free download from the Internet. We hope that you like the slide show. It is our intention to now have these images printed up into a poster, we are looking into the costs first though.
We now intend to search the school grounds for different colours and hues to make an envrionmental colour wheel. We will be using the following flickr tool as an inspiration.

This album is powered by BubbleShare - Add to my blog

Tohatoha

The purpose of this blog is to provide a space where ideas can flourish, where two schools Woodford Junior, Plympton, England and Meadowbank Primary, Auckland, New Zealand can share ideas, resources and cultures. Who knows, over time maybe we will be joined by other schools from other countries.
Tohatoha is a Maori word that means to spread abroad, distribute, disperse, spread. This is exactly what we want our students to do, to distribute learning abroad, to disperse their cultural knowledge and share in the knowledge of their peers from the other side of the world.