Thepipbuzz

Today one of our groups of young mathematicians collaborated in solving a problem so that Marama knew how much money she needed to save before going on her big OE. What was and always is incredible to see, is the variety of strategies that we all use and can explain to others so, like all good mathematicians, we can double-check our answers. After we solved the problem, we explained our methods to each other and pointed out where some of us made mistakes.  Post problem discussion: "It's OK to make mistakes, because we can learn lessons from them." "I didn't get that. Can someone explain how they solved it?" "What did I do wrong?" "That was easy.... I just solved it in my head." "Can I use a calculator?"

We thought that some of our parents may not have seen our Collaborative Art pieces from the start of the year that are displayed in our two spaces.  As a whole class, we are so proud of our art work. Koka Ngaire posted our end results in the NZ Primary Teachers Facebook group and as you can see from the photo - we got over 800 likes from teachers from all around NZ !  Their comments were beyond what we hoped for - many teachers have taken the idea and used our work to show their classes so that they could do the same kind of activity. We found this awesome artist Wahyu Romdhoni who creates these amazing animal portraits. So, we printed the pictures out A4 and then divided the picture into a grid to match the number of students (these were both roughly 5x6 squares). We cut the picture up so that we had 30 sm all squares for each pic. Each learner got a little square and a square piece of cartridge (A4 size but squared off). Then we just went through skills for enlargement, then...

Wow - our first week of using our new digital timetable in our Collaborative Space! We have been leading up to this for the first 4 weeks of Term 1.  We have had to learn lots and acknowledge that we are all in charge of our learning. We sign up for workshops with Koka Ngaire & Matua Fergus according to our goals and current gaps in our learning.   We are so proud of our first couple of days of working this way - a big change for a lot of our learners! We get to choose what we want to do and when to do it.  That makes us feel in charge of our learning.  We are getting more learning done because we don't have to always check in with the teacher as a class for everything.  Our timetables make it easier for us to remember what we should be doing and blogs make it easier for us to share our learning. Our trickiest learning has been around signing up for workshops and remembering to fill  in our timetables correctly. We enjoy using our devices, but we a...