Thursday, November 15, 2007

Garden Design

At Porirua East School each class is involved in designing and creating a class garden. There has been a lot of activity, much of it during Discovery Time, with students raising seeds, digging hard clay soil, adding mulch and fertilizer, planting and watering.

Today some moved on to more decorative features. The woodwork bench was out and several bird tables were being created. Year three students showed amazing skill.

"We've had the woodwork bench quite a few times this term, so they're getting pretty good," said their teacher.



The finished product!

There's a hook under the arm to hang the food from.
Great design, well done Sohaib :-)








Sunday, November 11, 2007

Anyone for sushi?

The class were finding out about rice - How it grows, where it grows etc. We thought we should include some 'rice' activities in Discovery Time.



We started with fried rice, using the electric frypan in the classroom - a great success, so then thought we could move on to sushi... A bit ambitious as none of us had made sushi before!
(purchased a sushi kit at the supermarket - with full instructions).


But hey! great success! A wonderful activity with great opportunities for oral language.

  • Describing the smell of the nori
  • Cutting 'thin' rather than 'thick' pieces of cucumber
  • Dividing the sushi rolls in 'half' then 'half' again
  • Finding words to describe the wasabi - those that were game enough to taste it!
We also had fun practising with chopsticks!


Best of all, by working in small groups of four, everyone who wanted to make sushi could and there was enough for everyone to have a taste.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Using ICT in Discovery Time

At Russell school year 4, 5 & 6 students had been making juggling balls and learning how to juggle. Katarina, became something of an expert at making the balls, so decided to go one step further. She took a sequence of photos to show how to make them. We then worked together to put them into 'movie maker' and presented it to the class. It took two sessions to complete but the result was great - a real example of persistence.

'Movie maker' is part of the Microsoft package, so is on most school computers. It's easy for students to drag photos in and add transitions to link each picture.

Our key learning point ....
Only take photos in landscape not portrait if you are putting them into movie maker!!!!!