July 30

Premier’s Be Active Challenge

be-active-headerOur school will be participating in the Premier’s be active challenge this term. This information came too late to put in my newsletter, but I have signed the class up and we have begun to fill in our logs. If you want to find out more visit http://www.pbac.sa.edu.au/Home.aspx

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The requirement is that students record their fitness/ aerobic activities completed over each day. They need to complete four weeks of an hour a day. Now given we have three sessions of fitness – twelve minute run, corporate clump and beat up, one lesson of PE and most kids are very active during lunch and recess which collectively add up to an hour, this shouldn’t be too difficult. Of course the activities must be the huffing and puffing type. By all means include any after school sports.

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We have begun by filling our logs in for our swimming and we’ll back date last weeks activities given the late start. Each different type of activity needs its own colour code. There are incentives for the school if students manage a whole ten weeks. Perhaps some of our students may want to take that on too.

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July 28

Week two is Swimming Week at The Adelaide Aquatic Centre

Our Swimming skills brainstorm

Our Swimming skills brainstorm

On the Friday before our swimming lessons we set about making a list of the strokes/skills we already could do. As we have two lessons each day, that was a lot of time to develop our skills further. I asked the students to reflect on the skills they could already do and were confident in and to have a goal to achieve three things during their lessons if possible.

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Using strategies from the Habits of Mind, I asked them focus on  creating, innovating and imagining – to try to display their thinking in new ways. They were creative indeed.DSC08133DSC08129 DSC08130 DSC08131

 

It’s been fun meeting our swimming teachers and learning new skills in our mixed groups.

What has been the best part of your lessons so far?

What do you think about swimming lessons at the Adelaide Aquatic Centre?

How do you think you’ll go with your goals?

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Swimming this week has been great fun. Each lesson is filled with lots of practise in all sorts of swimming skills. We’ve been challenged by our instructors and working hard to push ourselves to do our best. Sometimes though, the way we think can affect how well we do. We discussed the many worries, fears or what if’s that get stuck in our head whether we want them there or not. Then we discussed different ways of thinking to overcome these worries. Students again used their design skills in creating, imagining and innovating to show how they faced their fears in swimming. Personally I think their art skills are developing well, but I am biased.DSC08290 DSC08291 DSC08292

 

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Did we do any maths in swimming lesson? ( I asked that one just before our work on metres today as we missed all of last weeks lessons)

 

Yes of course was the unanimous reply then they rattled off a whole heap of skills, concepts, ideas etc…

estimating distances, checking depth, judging how far to swim, sizing up flippers, working out how far to throw the rope, counting enough boards, subitising equipment comparing amount of students, timing our swims, co-ordinating body parts, patterns, walking in arrays ….. just from what I remember. Aren’t they great.

 

See just when I thought we had missed a whole week of maths they had made connections with numeracy to their fitness!

July 20

Board Games

Last term during our science investigations on Day and Night, students chose to either research in depth The Sun or The Moon. Armed with this new learning I asked each child to design a board game that would teach people about their topic.

We began by playing some games and brainstorming what we thought games had.

We began by playing some games and brainstorming what we thought games had.

Then we listed things that made a game fun to play.

Designing and making the pathways on our board game was fun.

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Even though we made the games independently, we still needed to work together to share information and equipment.

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We needed a  lot of mathematics, numeracy and literacy skills for our science activity.

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After designing our own pathways we needed to create questions to ask using the Question Matrix.

After designing our own pathways we needed to create questions to ask using the Question Matrix.

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We are pretty proud of the effort we put into our games. Perhaps you’ll get to play them. Our neighbours in a year five class played some of our games and chose 4 of them to be entered into the Sir Mark Oliphant Science awards. We wish them well.

How good are these?

How good are these?

What was the best thing about making the board games?

How did you feel about other children playing your games?

July 16

Some art we created to get to know ourselves in term one.

To begin the year I gave the students a great task Rainbow portraits. While we are all in year three we’re all quite different. We needed to know about our individual identities what makes us unique, what are the different things we hold dear or are interested in. These were our finished pieces.


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We gave some of these portraits to Janet Sweeney, our teacher librarian, who passed them on to be in a display held by Royal Australian  Society of Arts Inc. as part of their Portrait Prize Exhibitionin the Institute Room, Ground Floor, Institute Building, Cnr North Terrace & Kintore Ave, Adelaide City. I was unable to see them but Ms. Jenny Smith remarked that Grange Kids art work looked stunning. If I can get some images taken by her I’ll pass them on. Good on us!

Our art came back and the Society presented us with gorgeous certificates. Like this…AVerVision-2015-Aug-11_15-06-33

Did you get a chance to see the exhibition?

What do you believe the people of Adelaide will think about when they look at your art work?

July 14

A new frontier

alienAs with Horizon, the space probe hurtling past Pluto, I too venture into unknown space, albeit cyber space. There’s no time like now to jump in and have a go at blogging. So please join with me as I attempt to go where no Eisenkolb has gone before. I hope to keep you all informed with the exciting happenings in our collaborative classroom. We would be pleased to hear your thoughts too. Join me as we share in new experiences and discoveries.

 spacerocket8 Even warp speed has to start somewhere!