100WC...4 weeks on...Improvements?!

4 weeks on...we are sharing Room 4's latest 100 Word Challenge. We are working really hard to make better word choices and using a variety of punctuation accurately. Today, before we wrote this we learnt how to use semi-colons in our work. Do you know how to use semi-colons? If not; click here.

We are also working on being more self-reflective. How do you think we went?

The Magic Box...By Rooms 3 & 4...Be Prepared to be Amazed!

Plugging Gaps...

For the next couple of weeks we are plugging some gaps in Maths! One of our learning gaps is understanding decimal place value. This whiteboard table makes it so easy to work together and talk about our learning. What kind of equipment do you like to use for your learning? 

First Aid: St Johns in Schools!

Room 4 loved having Felicia from St Johns in School here to learn some essential First Aid!

Keep an eye out for the students DLO's (Digital Learning Objects) they are currently working on and will post on their blogs soon!

Thanks to ASB for our awesome First Aid kits we got to keep!

Room 4 begins the 100 Word Challenge...

This week, Room 4 started the 100 Word Challenge for the first time! Today we learnt to write collaboratively on one Google Doc. This was great as we got ideas from other people and it motivated us. The 100WC is a weekly creative writing challenge that students do all over the world. Each week there is a different prompt (it might be a picture, or it might be a sentence). 

Teachers from all over the world will comment on our writing, so we are excited to see what they think and where we can improve. Check out our descriptive 100 Word Challenges below...What do you think? What shall we improve for next time? Tomorrow we are going to learn how to put it on our blogs!

National Young Leaders Day!

On Monday the 29th of May some of Room 4 took up the opportunity to attend National Young Leaders Day in Dunedin. It was a fantastic day (as it always is) and we were so inspired by the speakers. We made a slideshow of our favourite parts and this is shared below. 

Luckily, Daniel Flynn, founder of 'Thank You', donated two of his books to every school! Thank You is a social enterprise attempting to end global poverty. They give 100% of their profits from their awesome products to help people in need. 'Thank You' make great water, food, body care and baby products. In the last eight years they've given $5.5 million to people in need. WOW! 

Using Chromebooks for Learning!

Room 4 have started using their Chromebooks more as a tool for their learning. 

The advantages to this are:

• Students can learn anytime, anywhere (especially if they have a device at home too)

• Online access broadens the scope of any learning exercise, information pursuit, creative thinking, communication and collaboration.

• It's more inclusive - learning can be tailored to meet many more needs in the classroom in an engaging way.

• With GAFE (Google Apps for Education), each student has their email, drive and can access many apps/docs to create and share learning on.

In this picture, Flynn is using Google Docs to write his personal experience of the cross country. He took a photo of his whiteboard plan and has two screens up so he can see both easily. He needs his plan to remind himself what it is he going to write.

As he writes, Flynn uses a Chrome Extension called ReadWrite to help him edit his work. This reads it aloud to him while he is also reading it himself. His writing will soon be up on his blog so you can read and comment!

"I really like using the Chromebook for my learning. It's fun. It's a lot faster, I have a lot of ideas I can get down quickly. I reckon ReadWrite is a good tool for getting your punctuation in," explained Flynn.