Kia ora Ruma Rima Whanau,
This is going to be a very fast and action packed week of preparation for the 'Winter Tournament' and a chance for Ruma Rima to use their new connections and knowledge gained from our 'Tuning In' week (last week) where students were able to learn from different teachers and experience what it would be like to work collaboratively as a team.The 'Winter Tournament' is an annual event where our Rugby, Hockey, Soccer, and Netball teams head to Tauranga and compete for a spot in the finals/experience new competition from all over the BOP/PB region. We send all teams (irrelevant of being the 'best' or new to a sport) so that kids have development and experience in competing outside our region. We work hard to ensure our students have the best sportsmanship qualities and are having fun while there.
In class we are working on 3 main areas;
- Statistics - developing skills required to progress with constructing a 'info-graphic' to show how their lives reflect a 1st world life,
- Inquiry - learning about the process of finding information by asking open ended questions and creating sub-questions to further develop understanding. During this process they will need to decide on information that is true... and not so true.
- Coding - learning about 'code' language, problem solving, and applying learning to PE to help develop better strategies. We are 'modding' our lives to make them better. Coding is great for developing logic in problem solving; ideal for development of sequence in maths/writing, and will link with our 'argument writing' later in the term to develop structure/better paragraphs.
We are working to give learners more voice (student agency) in the learning process. We are using surveys to figure out how students would like to learn. This week we discovered that more kids prefer Mathletics as a working platform, but prefer to practice basic facts at school. We have made changes accordingly:
- We will complete a maths grid to develop basic facts at school. This will be each day until a student completes the grid to prove that they know their facts.
- We will be moving to using Mathletics instead of Khan. Students who prefer Khan, can keep on using the platform (there is no one solution - and several kids still prefer Khan). The most important thing is that students are completing their tasks/practicing facts.
- I will be asking students to use their own 'whiteboard markers' to write on tables (comes off relatively easy) to help them do 'working' to solve maths problems.
4. Blog work will happen once a week in class, instead of having a little bit of time each day.
