<b><i>Jun's Bannana Phone</i></b>

When Jun is older he is going  to create a Bannana phone.

Jack's V.I.P Party

Jack won a V.I.P. Party with his Dojo points in our class voucher bids. Here we are..... Yum yum.

Final Blue Effort - Winners

The winning team!

Alex and Spencer were a part of the winning blue basketball team from Medbury playing against Sacred Heart. In the C Grade Year 5 and 6 final Alex towered above others to rebound and score goals while Spencer contributed a number also.

The final score was a massive 28-12 win to Medbury. 

Mrs Hickman mentioned that this was a fantastic improvement on the last outing against the same team where they only won by two goals, which shows the tremendous gain in skills the boys have made through commitment and focus.

Well done boys!

Jack - Minecraft Cupcakes

Jack had his special day today and thanks to his folks we all had a minecraft cake for interval. Guess who is Jack in the class picture? Check out the closeup of the cupcake.


Is there a story in how the cupcake lost his eye? Who has the best idea? Write it in the comments below.

Ancient Egypt

This afternoon we started note taking about the daily life of a group of people in Ancient Egypt. We are learning to find main ideas, quote sources and put notes in a mind mapping programme called, Mindnode.  From there we will write a draft report in our offline "brick" draft book. When this has been conferenced we will use this information we have gathered to create an animation comparing this person to life of a similar person today.

Speeches Final. Wow!

Over the last three weeks we have been writing and presenting our speeches. The process was:

1. Planning them in Mindnode (mindmapping application). See example (yet to be posted).
2. Teacher Conferences for feedback and feedforward.
3. Shared thinking looking at our burger speech writing poster and using Ultranet resources to help us understand the topic better. Thinking about TEE (Topic, Example, Explanation)
4. Deciding what the rubric would look like and at what level a pupil could earn the "Expert" badge.
5. Writing the draft in our "Brick" draft writing book.
6. Conferencing this 2-3 times with teacher and or peers.
7. Writing up the finalised draft in our online draft book.
8. Further conference and tweaking with teacher.
9. Copy and paste to Pages application on the computer to put into columns and sepearate into speech cue cards.
10. Print and mounting the speech cue cards.
11. Practising our speech to the mirror, cat, parents, peers, sunshine any other listening object.
12. Learning what it means to be a listening audience. Manners, respect and how to listen actively to give feedback.
13. Presenting it to the class where we had two peers assessing the speech against the rubric we had created and another as the timekeeper. We then got our instant feedback.
14. Final conference with Mr Grieve and the peer markers to plot ourselves on the online rubric that will end up in our forallrubrics journal.
15. Selection of final three to class semi-finals. Spencer Maynard, Jun-Wha Shin and Ben Shand were in this.
16. Semi final class speeches were held with class votes as to who would represent the class.
17. Middle school speech final where Spencer Maynard and Jun Wha Shin represented our class.

WOW! What a lot in the process of making speeches! I was extremely proud of each boy's ability to write a speech of close to three minutes and then stand up and speak clearly. Some got the next stage with actions and eye contact. We really enjoyed each speech and, although only two boys were our class representatives in the finals, I thought that each boy in the class stepped up to the mark.

We will be posting the speeches to our blogs shortly.

Mr Grieve

Welcome NZ Quadbloggers

We are the focus of the NZ Quadblog for this week.

1. Here is a link to the survey form we have put together for our buddy classes around NZ.
2. Here are our class blogs for them to comment on. We have one class blog and then each boy has his own blog. Each boy's picture shows his interests.

Here are our current Quadbloggers blogs:

http://frankleyroom112013.blogspot.co.nz/

http://koraunui6.blogspot.co.nz/

http://ppsc2.blogspot.co.nz/

Quadblogging is where four classes join together to comment on and exchange ideas and look for ways to take the classroom beyond the four walls. Each week, one class becomes the focus of the other three classes and their pupils try to write comments on the blogs of the other classes.  Making good comments (poster here) is a Digital Citizenship skill.

This is our third Quadblogging experience. Some work better than others as it depends on how many comment pupils get from the buddy classes and any technical difficulties that you encounter along the way.