Thinking games...

Some of our students decided to play some thinking games with the seniors during our Learners' Conferences times. Great Tuakana / Teina on display!

Decorating a tree with beads...

Our students made a tree with beads...
"The beads are the flowers so that the bees can get the honey." - Tayla
"It can be our Christmas tree." - Case H
"We tried to make patterns with the beads.' - Poppy
"I used a yellow and purple bead." - Khloe

Some activities...

Activities during a guided reading session with Mrs Fitzgerald.

Building our Social Skills with 'Free Play'

Students are learning to build on their social skills, while taking part in free play. This leads to greater interaction among peers, adults and the world around them. This also improves their ability to share, negotiate, communicate and co-operate.

They choose to settle on...

Students had an opportunity today to choose anything / activities they would like to be involved in. I have been impressed with the self-discipline and responsibility they displayed.

Choices were:

Writing 'Funny Stories', Drawing, Making Cards, Construction with the Building Blocks, practicing Rhyming Words and to play with some educational toys.

Learning to act / making choices

After working on their handwriting, students had the opportunity to choose some learning activities they would like to be involved in. We are busy with slowly introducing our students to learner agency...

Task: Create something of your choice

Today students were given an opportunity to use the iPads to create something of their choice. The only requirement was that they should explain what they did. Here are their creations:

Choosing Learning Activities

Students had the opportunity (for a 'block' during the day) to choose some learning activities they would like to be involved in.

I have been impressed with the self-discipline and responsibility they displayed.

Chosen activities:

"Making Funny Stories is Fun" where they mixed and matched the dominoes so as to create amusing sentences. Students wrote and read sentences to each other.

Reading stories online and learning the alphabet names and sounds.

Students used the previously introduced "CVC word strips" which supports decoding and visual strategies for learning the spelling patterns of words.

Students continued to learn to develop their vocabularies and practiced decoding skills as they matched pictures to words with the "Matching Words and Pictures" interactive puzzles.

Interviewing other learners

Some of the Year 1 learners [independently] 'interviewed' other learners in our school as part of our contribution towards this year's Connected Educator Month.

You can view other contributions on the #Connected Rotorua - Pass the Blog here.

What are we learning when using technology?

We have been learning to make choices and manage our time with Ms van der Spuy and she lets us use technology all the time in our learning.  

With our iPads we can show our buddies what we are doing and it helps us with explaining our learning. Using our Notebooks, we publish our learning on our own blogs or we work on our Individual Learning Plans on the Class Wiki.

When we have ICT we are able to work on our Typing Skills, or we have a choice between Snailbob, Lightbot or drawing a Stickman. With these activities, we are learning to practice our Creativity, Problem Solving and Thinking Skills.

We are learning to find our own creative ways to do something and we enjoy working with anyone and everyone.

Our Buddies for Buddy Day

This year we participated in Buddy Day.  We worked in teams to paint and decorate our buddies.

Our buddies had to go to Tauranga and we heard that they were helping out at a Hospital and making sure all the sick people feel better.

We enjoyed our involvement in this project and it was lovely having the buddies at our school.