Walk the Talk Day Four

Another great day today where the students are starting to move with the flow. Almost all of the  students can find their Google Docs fairly quickly and their organisation skills are developing well.

Writing
We looked at Telescopic text to begin with as most of the students need to develop their sentences and expand them. The students were amazed at how 'I made tea' turned into a full story all about tea. We had a quick look at expanding one of the sentences from our story using the Telescopic text Writing page. I am turning this into a group activity for tomorrow. I will give them all the same sentence and turn it into a challenge. There are 9 computers which will allow 3 students to each computer.
One of the students finished her writing today so she was able to publish it to our Myths and Legends blog.

  The clipart she has used comes from the fantastic mrdonn.org website which is full of wonderful resources and free clipart for children. Eventually students will start creating their own clipart. They have learned how to create clipart using Keynote on the iPad and at the end of each day I give them a quick 5 minutes lesson on how to draw cartoons. I use 'How to Draw Cartoons' by Brian Platt ($2.99
Kindle on amazon.com)


This photo shows the students peer editing using the TV and AppleTV. They have mirrored their iPads to screen.
They also discovered to their amazement that they could mirror their mac laptops and iMac as well!





Reading
The students are enjoying all 4 books and are making slow progress through them. Having to write up their vocab log and prediction mindmap has slowed them down, but once they have mastered these they will be able to get onto the other activities. It is quite clear that a lot of the class need to work on vocab and the vocab log is making that very apparent! I make the vocab log a focus when the students join me for their group time, and they all participate in helping each other making sense of the words. Using the Kindle 'search' tool (I spoke about this in detail in my last post) that brings up where the word is in context and then tapping on the word to get the dictionary is starting to help them in deciphering meaning.

Maths
Some of the student work is starting to come through now, and they are making nets, doing worksheets, playing maths games and doing a little book work. In their group work we will revisit and look at if they are choosing all the fun games or choosing activities that fit their learning goals.
A couple of boys have discovered that they could draw using the isometric paper.






Here are some of the Shape animals they have made

Topic
Looking ahead to what the students might want to do with their Inquiry, I asked some of the boys to make Pyramids in Minecraft. Some of them already had, but very happily went ahead and made some more. I was amazed at how articulate they were when they were showing me what they made, how they made it and how to navigate through the chambers and tunnels. I am quite excited about what they will come up with once they know more about the systems of their chosen Ancient Civilisation.