Inanimate Alice Episode 5

Room 13 have been watching Inanimate Alice and exploring digital storytelling. In small groups we then created our own Episode 5 using PowerPoint (PPT). We found PPT easy to use with good animations but hard to convert for the internet. We managed to capture some of our stories using Jing but lost some of the sound affects. 


Today we Skyped one of the authors, Kate Pullinger. Some question we asked her are:

• Where did the idea for inanimate Alice come from? 
• Who inspired the names of the characters? 
• Why do you never show the faces of the characters? 
• What is Brad supposed to represent?
• Has inanimate Alice been recognised internationally? 
• Will there be new main characters in the next episode? 
• What has been the most exciting part of creating this story?
• What has been the hardest part of creating inanimate Alice? 
• What advice would you give for telling a good story?
• When will the next episode - (5) come out?

Damon, Phoenix and John



Mohana, Abbey, Amber and Monalisa

Blog of the Week

Blog of the Week

A digitally literate learner is able to chose the best web tool to suit their purpose and hook-in their audience.


Shweta has written a short but highly effective blog post that deserves to be featured on our class blog. The Edublog Challenge this week was about family, and Shweta used WORDLE to capture the characteristics of her parents in a creative way.


Have you asked your family to comment on your blog?

Doink and Maths

About Doink

Vatrina

Doink is basically a vector editor. Doink is a site where multimedia is easy to use, its not complicated like others. It has a variety of activities for all age groups including writing, drawing, animating and even creating slide shows. Doink is real useful for schooling activities.

We used Doink during math this week, we got a task to solve our given equation with a different strategy used each time. Doink has steps like a slide show, so if you draw in one slide then click the arrow - a new slide will pop up. Its as easy as that. Some groups had to solve the same problems using two strategies and had to show how they worked it out in Doink, once we finished we had to embed it into our Math wiki page.

I personally find Doink a bit boring, but would definitely recommend it for schools, it is very help full.

Here's the link: http://www.doink.com/

2. Zainab and Monalisa

Our activity was to create a “Doink” animation about our maths strategies that we are currently learning about. We were doing rounding and compensating as well as algorithms. We were trying to visualise our strategies and then bring them to life by using the animation. We were given a question by our teacher and that is what we explained in our animation. This helped our learning and taught us to learn in a visual way so that we could see every bit that we were learning, and to improve it. One of the strategies we used was rounding and compensating. Rounding and Compensating is a strategy were you round the biggest number to a tidy number, and then take it off at the end. Algorithm is a type of strategy.

Doink Sample

Rebecca/Karen

We chose Algorithm and Place Value because it’s easy to work out using those strategies and it’s easy for us to work out.



Abbey's place value by BRSroom13, made at DoInk.com




Shweta's Maths Problem A Week 4 by BRSroom13, made at DoInk.com

Answer this Form to rate "Doink"

Shweta/PJ

Athletics Training

Damon/Thunder

They have to pass a course in coaching in which they have to coach a school. Some have already taken our school to other sports. So this term they are doing Athletics for only 4 weeks and then our school will be entering the Eastern Zone Athletics Competition.

Assessment

Zech/Phoenix

I think the class has improved their skills as well and bonding with the trainers . We have improved our running , jumping , grunting and increased our stamina . We think the trainers are good role models to the students and the students have been great pupils to them .

Skills taught

High Jump

Macane/Benioni

This term, we are doing athletics and we got a really big tournament coming up and we had 4 weeks of training and we were doing well at it.So we are going to tell you about high jump.High jump is all about jumping over a pole but this is what you can do when you’re jumping over the pole.

*A Fosbury Flop

*And a scissor kick

So those are two main things and these are tips that you can do when your jumping, step by step.

*Lift your shoulders

*Bend your hip

*Then lift your legs.

And this is how to jump over a pole when your doing high jump.

Long Jump

Ben

This Term we have had NZIS come and teach us how to do athletics and one of the athletic sports that i got taught was Long Jump, They say. “Run down the pathway as fast as you can, then you jump as high as you can, then while you are in the air put your feet together and glide yourself towards the sand as far as you can go” I thought they were doing a great job at teaching me this because i have never been taught any of this athletic stuff before.

Discus

Shweta

The sport of "Discus" is full of power, strength and aim. You should be able to grasp the disk with full strength. And use your arm power to throw the disk with great force within the boundary.

• 
  
  Place the disk on your palm.


• 
  
  Wrap your fingers around it.


• 
  
  Swing the disk to touch the opposite hand.


• 
  
  Then on your third swing let go with great force.

When you let go remember that the disk has to land in the boundary other wise it is out. The practises and using the techniques that has been taught by the NZIS students have really had a huge impact on all of the class.

Shotput

Mohana/Abbey

This term we have been doing Athletics. There are 6 activities for athletics which include; Sprints, Relays, Long Jump, High Jump, Discus and Shot put. During shot put we learnt the 4 steps to throw it properly,

• Hold the shot put up to your neck


• Point your arm in the direction in which you are aiming


• Lean back on your strongest leg


• Then twist around and push the shot put out of your hand (never throw it or you would be disqualified)

We will work on these steps for the rest of the term and some people will go to the Eastern Zone competition.

John/Robert

During a relay race, members of a team take turns running, orienteering, swimming, cross-country skiing, biathlon, or ice skating (usually with a baton in the first) parts of a circuit or performing a certain action. Relay races take the form of professional races and amateur games. In the Olympic games, there are several types of relay races that are part of track and field.

We have learnt how to run and the arm skills and how we stated off.

f. Sprints (Amber)

photo- how to - what is good form - records so far?

Camilla/Elizabeth

Its nearly the end of the year and for sports this term we have athletics. For athletics we have shot-put, long jump and many more. Its getting really hard for us this term because we have many great sports players at our schools. We don’t have long before its time to really go to athletics, so we have to practices, practices, practices.

Halloween Stories to Scare You

This week started off with Halloween, so in class we watched some short scary video clips. Some we watched with and without sound, then we brainstormed the features of scary stories and what made the stories scary. Some of our class made their own scary story videos and others did peer assessments. 


What do you think makes a good scary story?


Ben and Macane's Story



Thunder's Story



Our Peer Assessment

Teamwork

On our first day we discusses the importance of the Key Competencies and practiced them in a fun small group activity. We had 15 minutes to design a creative outfit out of newspaper. We them did a self-assessment.

What do you think we learnt?

Kids with a View visit BRS

Room 03 from Point View School are our regular blogging buddies and they decided to visit us at our school. We welcomed them and paired up with buddies, check out our buddy wall below.
We looked at each others wikis and blogs, it was fun to get to know our buddies for real.


Later we introduced them to a Year 1 class from our school, Room 02. We hope they will also become internet buddies with Point View School. We have a great shared morning tea and then took them to our art exhibition.  Thank you for visiting us Kids with a View.




These are the photos of our day.


This is Room 03, Point View School blog.



This is Bailey Road Room 02's wiki.

After School Activities

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Challenge 4 Sept 2011

Class Digital Footprint

BRS Room 13 digital footprint too. When we did a Google search for our class name and the first 6 links were from our wiki, then some from our Flickr page and class blog.

We have joined many sites as a class which our teacher manages but we all share the username and password. Some are wikis, Kidblog, Blogger, Flickr, Google Apps, StoryBird, Vocaroo and Wallwisher.

This means that as an e-learning class we leave a good digital footprint because we only use first names and are careful about safety, but our footprint is about our learning and we are proud of that. We like other students to be able to find our wikis and digital work so they can comment and talk to us.

A digital footprint is not a bad thing if we manage it properly.
Challenge 3 linkback
Photo by Peter Nijenhuis

MIND BLOWING BLOG DESIGN

One of the students in our class has jazzed up our class blog, thank you Shweta. She has created her own blog which she won't mind if you visit. The background of the blog is based on art we are creating for our "School Art Exhibition", which is Graffiti. We are also doing stencil art and were inspired by Blek La Rat. If you like our new blog look please leave a comment.

le Rat

We are learning about graffiti stencil artists Blek le Rat and Banksy. After some research about them, we cut out and used simple stencils from printouts based on rat designs which appear in both their art.

What we liked about our art:
Vatrina: I liked that you could make your own design and cut it out as well as stencilling it by yourself. This art was enjoyable because depending on the hardness of your brush it shows the piece more effective.

What were the difficulties:

Vatrina: The difficulties of this art was using the craft knife. If you push too hard it will rip the paper and your paper will become rough on the edges, but if you push lightly it will keep the paper smooth

Zainab: I found that using the craft knife is harder to use than I thought. If you don't use the knife in the correct position it will cut i correctly and make it all rough. It you do it in the right position it will cut smoothly.

What I found interesting:

Zainab: I honestly never knew how to make a stencil out of cardboard. I used the craft knife thinking that it will be easy and wont take me long but when I got hold of the knife, I knew it will take me a long time.

Rebecca: When Mr Wood showed us how to cut a rat with a craft knife it looked easy, but when I tried it was hard.So I kept on trying and I got really use to it.

Avatars and Blog Challenge

We are remembering how to keep safe online by creating avatars for our "About Me" post on the EduBlogs Student Blog Challenge which we are taking part in. "September Challenge 1"

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

From a Google Map to a Scribble Maps.

Yesterday Mr Wood introduced scribble maps to the class. A Scribble map is like Google Maps but better because it allows you to scribble, draw and mark out routes. You can pin point particular places on a map and even create a scavenger hunt. That is what we did. Pupils in our class created three different courses (A, B and C) surrounding the school grounds, and let us say, our group definitely made it very challenging. The other groups also made it very hard and difficult as well, putting their questions on top of things, or underneath things; and in some courses we found questions on the edge of a building. Sometimes we had to run from one end of the school, right to the other; the junior school right through to the senior syndicate, up to the middle syndicate. In the end we managed to come first in one of the courses with a time of 17 minutes. Below are the three courses we created in groups, and also some of the students thoughts and opinions of what they think each group did well and what the students could improve and do better next time.

Course A:


Course B:


Course C:
my groups course:



Good and Improvements from students.

Castles

At first I thought it was going to be a boring as day because more then 50% of the class had gone to netball, but it actually turned out to be an enjoyable six hours. We started the day off finishing the rest of our math work as it was the last day we would have time to finish off for the weeks work & time flied. Mr Wood gave us a Figure It Out book with an activity that involved measurements. We all thought this is going to be boring, well I’m not sure about the rest of them but that’s what I was thinking.  The picture that was given to us was an idea of how to put the castle together. By the end of the day, we had measured all our measurements & glued it together using the hot glue gun & we were painting, we added little circles / ovals looking like we had pebbles on our stone walls which I think is really unique. We are not quite finished but it’s looking real good so far. Vatrina

Measurement and Castles

On Thursday we had to make a castle, it may sound fun but we had to measure every wall and  every other details, BUT AT THE SAME TIME IT WAS REALLY GREAT. We had to measure all the cardboard and glue it together with a hot glue gun. We decided to paint it baby blue and light pink.We worked in a  group of 4 (Amber,Monalisa,Elizabeth and Katalina).We all took turns to paint and glue everything together, we made a princese’s tower, a pond, some trees and a frog with some lillypads. We all enjoyed getting messy and we had a blast.

Making Castles

Yesterday my group made a awesome castle made out of hard cardboard it was fun we all worked as a team and at the same time we had fun.In my group was Benjamin, Damon, Benioni and me.After a hard days work we painted it it was wierd because we had mixed the colours together to make a colour we hadn’t use.And this was my day. ZECHARIAH

Damon: On Thursday the 18th August, Zacaraiah, Ben, Benioni and I made castles out of hard cards, glue guns and we used measurement to cut the card to it’s pin point location.

Each of us had a different job.
Ben was the designer.
Zacaraiah was the leader.
Benioni was the designer of the army men.
And I was the cutter and the one who glued the cards.

After a while, we finished the castle and then zac and i painted the castle while Ben made some accessories.

Yesterday we made castles out od]f cardboard, hot glue guns and scissors. I made soldiers for the castle and painted them. Benioni

Year 8 Boys Netball

John:
We did pretty good because we came 3rd place we won against Churchill Park School,it was a
tough game because even though they were shoot they had the skills to beat us but we had talented players.

Phoenix :
Kohimarama Were a good team but we should of won because we were better BUT we underestimated them and got way too cocky which is not a very good thing . First half was not so good but the second we did a bit better . We gave away to much penalty's that shouldn’t have been given .

Macane:
Our first game was Tamiki Intermidiate and at half time, we were leading 3-0 and when the full time ended, we won 7-3 and after that we had something in mind and that was munching out on our food and then we were getting ready for our next game and that was Ellerslie.

Year 8 Girls Netball

Our first game went very well, we had an exciting and great start against Ellerslie. It was a fast-packed and friendly game. I was playing Goal Defence for the first half and Goal Keep for the second half. In the end we won 9-5. That win really pumped us up. - Mohana

It was hard work running up and down the court, but we got the hang of it. l only played in three of the games, l played many parts like, WD, GD, GK, and WA. l never got to play full time but l still had fun. But at the end we came third place, we were glad, winners or losers we still had fun.

On our first game I played in the second half and I was WD (Wing Defence) . We played Ellerslie and to me they were very easy, when we won that game we were so happy! . When we played Point England most of them were all tall to me, they were very good and they had a strong team and they worked together very well. I think that’s why they had beaten us , but we still played hard and tried our best to win . - Rebecca

At about 9:00 a.m. the bus filled with boys and girls left our school to go to Auckland Netball Centre. We gathered under some shade and then started to get ready for our first game. For the year 8 girls we had to wait fro about an hour before our game started.Once we got on we were pumped and ready to go. We won the game against Ellerslie  9-4. We were so elated.
-Abbey

When we played our second game, we played Point England.  I played GD for the whole game, but...we lost (21-3).  They were so hard, but they’re techniques were good because they used their tall players as shooters.  I think we played and tried hard. : ]
 
I played he first half in the first game against Ellerslie. We won that game and then had a break for the next round. When Round 3 came it was our turn to play again. We played Point England and unfortanatly we lost. I did not play in that game. That was the only games that I played in.
Zainab

Rock Stars

Our school was lucky to have Rock Band, a group of musicians visit for a week and teach Year 6, 7 and 8 students to play different instruments. Room 13 spent the week learning to play and performed 'Back in Black' in assembly on Friday.

School is Cool

Some people may think that creating a poster about "Why your School is COOL!" would be easy peesy but I can truly say it wasn't. Especially with a twist like mine it would take ages to create a plan. The twist was that I had to take pictures in a way so that is couldn't see any faces. After drafts, taking photos various time and sitting with the teacher discussing it, I had my final copy.
I was excited to enter my complete poster in.

After the holidays when I came to school in the morning my teacher Mr Wood surprised me and told me that I was a finalist in the Year 8 Category. I was shocked and was extremely happy! I have never ever been a finalist for a competition Everrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I just can't wait till they announce the winners!

VoiceThread

We have been learning to use VoiceThread. We have also been learning to multiply decimals and here we show you our strategies.

Trash to Fashion Practice

Next week is our Trash to Fashion show, our theme is Matariki and Japanese. We use some old trash and use it to make clothes for the fashion show. We use things like bottle tops, plastic bags, newspaper, old sweet packets and lots of other trash.

The photos below are of us practicing our walk and moves on the catwalk in the hall. Next Thursday at 6:30pm is when the Trash to Fashion show starts. The Year 7 and 8's will go up onto the stage and model their outfits.

I am nervous but I like long dress, sometimes it gets itchy. On the left is my poster for the show.

Room 13 make the news

East & Bays Courier: June 2011

Point View QR Messages

Hi Room 3 at Point View School, thank you for your QR code comment replies, we loved them.
These are our QR Code messages for you.

Boat Race

Last week our homework was to make a boat our of paper and bread clips, and on Friday we had a race. At home we had to record what changes we did to make our boats go faster and other experiments like that.

When it came down to the two finalists who were Vatrina and Monolisa, Vatrina won and got a chocolate fish.

There were also other competitors in the class that made boats and it was a lot of fun seeing the boats move like they did when the contestants added the dishwashing liquid into the bread clips.

I didn’t get a chance to compete because I had to help other students with there work but from what I heard from the other side of the room was heaps of laughter and fun.

Damon

The Art of Science

Today in science we explored the reaction that happens when you add liquid detergent to milk. We discussed what happened and Mohana took photos with a webcam. The colours were amazing and we wondered if cream would have even a bigger effect?


After all the amazing effects of the dye colours mixing we decided to try a similar thing with shared painting. Each group had a small blob of paint in each corner (red, blue, green, yellow), the students had to work together to mix the paints together into art.

Have you ever tried this experiment?
Why do you think this happens?

Matariki Storytelling

Our class has been learning to create digital stories. These are some of our Matariki digital stories.

Thunder, Robert and Macane


Camilla


Tayla


Karen and Rebecca


Benioni


Amber, Elizabeth and Monalisa

Testing New Classroom Furniture

Mr Linington brought three new classroom chairs to Room 13 for us to test for a week. These are the  chairs shown below, and our student report on what they thought. Which chair is your favourite? Black Orange Green Seriale online

Our Class Experiment – Egg & Vinegar

Science Investigation Process - Egg & Vinegar Experiment.

Last week Monday, 11.05 Mr Wood put a fresh egg in a wine glass and filled the glass with white vinegar.

Our big question was What happens to an egg while in vinegar?

Our hypothesis was The egg shell will dissolve, it will go see through and the yolk will turn into liquid when it cracks.

The Method we used was:

1. Put full fresh egg(with shell) in a glass.

2.Cover/pour with white vinegar.

3. Leave for one week.

4. Check and record daily progress.

Things we could’ve changed or vary:

1. Time of putting the egg in the glass.

2. Time of pouring vinegar into glass.

3. Egg size.

Things we could mesure:

1. Vinegar. (different types, white, etc.)

2. Weight of egg.

3. Hardness or softness of egg.

4. Colour of egg.

Observation/Results:

Day 1(morning): The egg sunk right to the bottom of the wine glass and the egg is covered with tiny bubbles.

Day 1(afternoon): Egg shell is abit rough.

Alot more bubbles surrounding egg.

Egg is moving from on place to another in the glass.

Day 2: Egg shells peeling off.

Bubbles appearing at the top of the glass(surface of vinegar).

Some parts of egg shell is dissapeared and the egg white is visible.

Day 3: Bubbles have dissapeared.

Vinegars stable.

More shell is releasing from the egg and and floating at top.

Looks crinkly.

Washed egg.

Day 3(after washing egg): Washed off the loose shell, now eggs plain white.

Put back in vinegar.

Day 4: Vinegar has become alot more stable.

More egg white is alot more visible; looking foamy.

Some parts of the egg is turning seethrough.

Day 5: Egg white has split.

Yolk is very stable, hasnt spread like a liquid which was expected.

Last Day: Egg white is very wrinkly.

Further Questions:

1) Why is the egg white holding together?

2) Why didnt the egg yolk spread into a liquid once the egg shell was broken.

3) If we put the egg in at different time, would it effect our result?

4) What if the egg was not fresh?

5) What if the egg was boiled?