Walk the talk Clevedon Day 2

I had a wonderful day with the children in Room 7 today. A few were away at soccer all day, so they will have to catch up tomorrow. It was great to see the students starting to get into the activities and being excited about their learning. I was impressed to see several children who organised their iPads so that the work they do for me (Google Docs etc) are saved as a Bookmark to Home screen and then organised into a folder. One child even calls his folder 'Jacqui Sharp' and is quite proud of his organisation.
We talked about introductions and setting the scene for writing and I demonstrated using the Narrative framework. Students will use this as their drafting template and when it is finished they will share and open in Pages for crafting and editing. I managed to see all of the writing groups at different times to show them their assessment.
Before they are ready to conference with me they have to have looked at the 'Have I...' table and check off that they have attempted or achieved all of the goals.

Reading time was fun as now we are starting to look at each chapter of their books and discuss them. Most students have started their Chapter Title assignment  and their Vocab Log We have discovered that Google Spreadsheets on iPads are a little tricky to do, so some of the children have been going onto the computers and laptops to fill in that information. Tables on Google Docs are problematic as well, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. They can be still quite fiddly so some children have reverted to laptops as well.

We started with the Shape Workshop with maths, I called one group up with their maths books and the rest chose from their Geometry Tasks.

It was interesting to see which activities they have gone for. I will blog more about this and have some photos over the next few days.
For the iPads I recommended these maths apps

Geoboard (Free)	Maths app for Geometry
Tanzen HD Lite (Free)	Maths app for Geometry, tangrams
ScreenChomp (Free)	Whiteboard app that will be used for maths
iOrnament (Free)	Maths app for tessellation

The iOrnament app has been a huge success and several students are creating the most amazing tessellations and patterns. A couple of them have asked if they can create a presentation of their best creations. Some other students are enjoying the Geoboard app and have started taking screen captures of their designs as well.

We started our Inquiry Unit today 'Ancient Civilisations'. The big questions are
What systems were developed by past civilisations?
What legacies have past civilisations left behind?
What connections are there between the past and present?
The focus question I gave them today was

• ‘What do you think a Civilisation is?’
• What past civilisations do you know of?
• What do you know about them?
• Have a look at https://sites.google.com/site/1ancientcivilizationsforkids/ for information
• Use the book resources in our room

And I gave them a choice of how they wanted to mindmap their ideas

Work on a Fact Recall with 3 others

You can use

• Post its
• Inspiration & TV
• Large paper and coloured pens
• Popplet on laptops

These students already have an excellent background in mindmapping and working together and soon there was a wonderful buzz happening in the room. Some needed to be reminded about what the question was, but were soon back on track. It was fabulous to see how they were using the tools they needed as they needed them.

3 of the groups decided they wanted to use Large paper and coloured pens. They used their iPads to refer to the questions, to look up definitions and to find information. Several got the books from the display and were using those as well.









There was only one technical glitch in the day. The internet went down for about half an hour. The projector is wireless so we couldn't use that or the Apple TV. We couldn't use Google Docs but as one of the students said 'It doesn't matter, we are working on Inspiration so we don't need the internet!' So we survived after all!