Nga Toi ki a Parkvale Kura

Kia ora koutou

What an awesome morning we had with our buddy classes Room 5 and 8 on the Amazing Art Trail created by Mrs Hill. KIA ORA MRS HILL! WE WERE ART DETECTIVES!

We had the enjoyable job of helping our junior buddies read, understand and follow clues with a map to find all the wonderful art at our school. Luckily Room 11 had already completed the task the days before so we could fully concentrate on helping our junior buddies with the same task.

Mrs Lowe had made our task quite digi as we had to bring up the document of clues on an I-Pad. We read, followed instructions, recorded the answers to the tasks and took photos of the art we found. Returning back to class, we then had to choose an app to creatively share our learning which was 
"TO APPRECIATE THE ART IN OUR ENVIRONMENT AND  FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS." 

For some of us, the second part was challenging. Anyway,  here is one of the Pic Collages of the art found on the Trail.

Connecting maths to real world contexts.

How High is that Tree?

I am a believer in teaching maths within a real-life context. I teach maths in ways that connect with student's real-life experiences because I want them to see that maths is everywhere and it can be used in the realities of everyday life - it is simply a language, a way of making sense of, interpreting the world we live in. 

By placing maths in an authentic real world context, we make maths more relevant and purposeful, the students learn the mathematics knowledge and skills that they need and understand better the learning contexts that they see each day. They begin to see the learning about maths in ways that make the knowledge and understandings transferable and connected to other topics, subjects and their lives.

In this learning task, we are learning about angles by making a clinometer to measure the height of a tree, pole ....  and in doing so relating the maths concepts that we are learning about, such as right angle triangles (vs equilateral), degrees, units of measurement, interior angles, adjacent lines, side lengths etc  ... and the skills of using a protractor, a metre ruler, measuring accurately, using number knowledge, choosing operations & applying strategies, working together, communicating ideas ....and how to apply such knowledge and skills to do some basic trigonometry.

PART ONE:  sequence and a video snapshot of the learning involved in making a clinometer.

PART TWO: measuring the tree/pole in student blogs (coming soon!)

Thank you Max

WALT show not tell.
Success Criteria:
1. First paragraph is the introduction with details of who, where, what and why and with a hook.
2. Add relevant and interesting detail to each paragraph by using my senses.
3. Use interesting vocabulary that creates a clearer picture for the reader.

Max's Smoothie

'Cheers Big Ears!' I said aloud, grinning from ear to ear.

 Today at school Max brought me a smoothie that he made with Mrs Cacace. He was learning to follow instructions to make a healthy smoothie and he brought me a glass. What an awesome surprise!

As soon as I saw it, I knew that one of the ingredients must be the super vege ' SPINACH'  BECAUSE IT WAS A LIME GREEN.....and it looked  the same colour as my smoothies I make every morning. 

When I was a kid, there was a TV cartoon character called Popeye the Sailorman who would down a tin of spinach whenever he needed strength to fight off the baddies. Who'd figure that years later I would be downing spinach too, except there are other ingredients with it like banana and kiwifruit.

Wel,l I was supposed to have it for lunch but then Mrs Tamati an ex-teacher at Parkvale came in to see me and the class, and I forgot about my smoothie sitting in the teacher station.

So it was again a nice surprise when after school, I peered ito my teacher station and saw that super smoothie sitting there just waiting to be swallowed. Kathy our cleaner was in the classroom at this stage so I asked her to take a photo of me just before I drank it.

Yuuummmm! Cheers Max, I enjoyed that.