Once again I am back in the year 6/7 class so we will be restarting our blogs.

This is a place that students will be able to keep you up to date with what they are doing in class and reflect on their own learning.

Feel free to comment and give them feedback on what they share – check our commenting guidelines tab first.

We’re back! A new year and some new students added to the class for another action packed year. Feel free to comment on student posts as they share their learning and activities with you.

Today marks the end of our school year. We have farewelled our year 7 students, who will no doubt continue to work hard on their education where ever they end up.

It has been a busy year with many,many student achievements. They should all be proud of their efforts across the whole range of curriculum areas.  The end of year concert was amazing and they all performed well both their dancing and drumming. Our year 7 speeches and performance were outstanding. Well done everyone.

To read their round up of the year, the highs and lows, click on their pages.

This week we returned to school to find the NBN connected and ready to go! Has it made a difference? Definitely. There isn’t the lag time while waiting for pages to load. No more excuses to waste time especially when using things like Duo Lingo for our French program.

Students aren’t as frustrated using computers, Can’t wait to set more tasks that can be completed online now.

This term we have been reading Wonder by R J Palacio – almost finished, will read the last section next term.

It has been a novel that has had many students thinking – What would I do, How might I handle that? There were many themes running through the book and much discussion about the  main character Auggie and his encounters as he has his first year at school after being home schooled. Friendships were tested, bullying obvious and kindness overflowed.

Students have given a quick insight into the novel and what the themes were that they followed in the book. This is just one of the many activities students completed. Read their ideas on the right hand side of this post.

Last week we had a 3rd of the class away. Many were at SAPSASA hockey and soccer in Adelaide and some were ill. So the timetable and programme had a makeover. Everyone left had to choose a topic of interest to them and worked on that during most afternoons.

We had a range of new skills mastered including crochet, scone making and we got to eat delicious sponge made by another student.  The experiments making honeycomb and comparing the use of honey, golden syrup and treacle were tasty, but we weren’t expecting someone to lose a tooth eating them – it was already loose.

Our new MaKey MaKey got a run too, with controllers made from bananas, alfoil, plastecine and coins to work with Scratch coding.

Read student’s blogs to find out what they were up to during the week.

Here’s a report from some of our students who attended the leadership forum at the start of this term.

On Tuesday the 28th of April, 7 of the year 6/7 students went to Mount Gambier for a GRIP Leadership Conference to learn about being a leader and how to be a good leader at school. We did a few introduction activities before we started other activities.

The first activity was about standing up and making the most of leadership opportunities. We did an activity about the four reasons to stand up, they were stand up when there is an opportunity, stand up for what is right, stand up for others and stand up for yourself. Three times during the day we did an activity with the loud noise boys which were very entertaining.

We did an activity about paying it forward which is to continue on a good deed if someone does a good deed to you. In this activity we were given six situations and had to work out how to pay it forward with time, talent or treasure.

The next activity was about looking for opportunities to lead. We learnt that when looking for an opportunity to lead you have to look and listen every day, ask, decide and do.

After this activity we developed our leadership plan in which we had to pick a priority area, listen, choose an activity and take the next steps. In groups of three or four we made one to use at school. The day ended with a Q&A with the GRIP Leadership team in which students got to ask questions that were answered by the GRIP Leadership team.

At the end of Term 1 we had a mini ‘Blogging Boot Camp’.

Students spent most of each day learning a skill for blogging and then put it into practice to create their blog page. Now we are up and running with at least 1 blog entry from each student. Each student has been asked to comment on the blogs following our commenting guideline as well. It has been a learning curve for all of us, with much excitement when their page was created and then as their posts have appeared.

We’d love to hear from you.  Read about what happened in the class during Term 1 by clicking on the names to the right of the page. Don’t forget to check the guidleines if you want to write a comment to any of the students.  All comments are moderated and won’t appear on the pages immediatley so please be patient.

Joann

This is it. I am taking on the challenge to create a blog for my class. 2015 looks like being an interesting year as I have just completed the CSER Digital Technologies online course and now on to blogging.

I see this blog as a way to share information with families and maybe the world, about what is happening in our classroom and beyond.

It will be a place for me and the students in my class to reflect on their learning and share learning and successes. For now it will just be me, but soon I hope to add students voices to the blog.