Amazing Race Challenge Links
OK, here are the links you need for our timezone Amazing Race challenge.
Firstly, we will be following Season 7 for our class.
Time To Be Poetic
It is the last week of term and it is time to put your poetry writing skills to the test. Your task this week to write and then publish between three to five poems by the end of the week. The twist is that each poem must be of a different format – for instance, you can only do a limerick once. Your repertoire could look like this – one limerick, one haiku, one humorous rhyming poem and one free verse.
You can either publish your poetry in one or a combination of three places – your blog, handwritten in your journal or published in a document. Take your time to draft your poems in your English book. You will get the most time for this on Monday and Tuesday so make the most of it – only bank on producing one or two poems later in the week when Ms Martin has other priorities. You will need to do some research as well so that you are not limited in your choices for formats. You can refer to your original notes from Espresso, you can go back to Espresso if you wish to use their resources or you can grab a laptop and look through the following places for ideas.
The Children’s Poetry Archive
Poetry4Kids
K-12 Interactive Poetry
Good luck – looking forward to reading some outstanding poems.
Write Your Own Kenning
We are learning about various forms of poetry at the moment. One easy but creative type of poem is called a kenning. Espresso describes a kenning as the following:
A kenning comes from the Old English and Norse languages and is a way of naming something without using it’s name. So a Viking warrior might call his axe ” skull crusher” and we might name our football boots “net busters”.
The Espresso site also offers the following example:
My cat
Mouse catcher
Leg scratcher
Soft speaker
Sun seeker
Flea keeper
Long sleeper
Fish eater
Dog beater- Anonymous
So, time to try one of your own.
Term Two 2010
High Flyer
Achievement of Learner Quality
4. Are able to solve problems co-operatively and independently.
This learner quality has an activity that asks you to solve a word or number puzzle. Here are a couple of excellent links to give you some printable puzzles appropriate to your own level.
Time For Some New Spelling Activities
I’ve had a few requests from students to change the spelling activities we use. So during this week, we will be using the following article Ten Common Writing Mistakes Your Spell Checker Won’t Find. These words are not difficult but even adults struggle with when the correct time is to use them.
1. Read the article and write out the ten examples as your list words. There are more than ten words overall.
2. Telephone Words – Translate your words into numbers from a telephone keypad.
3. Wordsearch -Make a wordsearch that includes every word, then trade with a friend and solve.
4. Story words – Write a short story using all your words.
5. Cartoons – show the difference between three of the ten examples in the form of little cartoons with speech bubbles.
I hope this breaks the cycle of predictability for spelling activities. Do you have any others to suggest? Add them in the comments below.
An Update Post
Well, this blog hasn’t shown as much activity as the students’ blogs have so it is time for an update to get information flowing here again in our class online hub.
We started looking at Place Value this week in Mathematics and some of you had the chance to try out Place Value Pirates on the interactive whiteboard. There are a number of other good sites that are really good for cementing the concepts into place. Please try some out and let us know in the comments which ones are the better ones. This video is also a good way to check if you are a bit stuck or want to revise the concept.
Many students were very interested in the interactive Anzac Day Website. There is more and more information about the Anzacs online now – it is important that all young Australians know about the sacrifices made by previous generations in defence of our country. Please feel free to re-visit the site and explore some of the links from the ABC website.
Getting Our Student Blogs Off To A Great Start
There have been some very good blog posts so far in 2010. We have only had the blogs up and running for a few weeks and there have been some forward goal setting and some reflective writing on the year so far. Carla reflected on her team’s efforts in one of our Inquiry units. Danza has summarised his start to the year in great detail and Ruffhead reflected on how things have changed for him now he is a Year Seven. Touly celebrated her success with her Year Seven jumper design but remembered to acknowledge her friends:
The winning design was made by me (touly), nomi and Sarahybeary.
So, writing in a blog is different to writing on paper for many reasons. It can easily accessed by others and has a big technical advantage over the book based version of communication with the ability to hyperlink to other places on the internet. Writing in a blog gives the writer a chance to not only post on their own experiences and ideas but to react and respond to other people’s ideas. So, here is this week’s blogging task.
We are not limited to exchanging ideas within our own classroom. Because we use cybersafety practices with our identity, it is a good opportunity to read and reference other students like ourselves. If you click on the link here, you will find a very long list of other classes and students from around the world participating in class blogging.
Spend some time looking through and reading blogs from a selection of students on the list. Bookmark a few that you find interesting and maybe even leave a comment. That will attract interest back to your own blog as bloggers usually follow the links from comments to see who is reading their blog. Once you have left a comment, start a post of your own back at your blog that uses a hyperlink back to that particular post, writing about what you read and what you thought about it. It is good practice to use a relevant quote to help with the post as well. It doesn’t have to be long – but it will give your classmates a chance to explore and connect with some peers around the globe.
Let’s get to it.
Welcome to 2010
- http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Learning.jpg/400px-Learning.jpg
Welcome to Learning Area 20. This blog will become the online home for our class. Looking forward to a great year.
