Room 8's Adventure Learning and Kids Cafe Presentations

These are our Adventure Learning and Kids Cafe Presentations. We created our eBooks by using My Story on the iPads. The Kids Helping Kids group also put together a small movie to teach other children how to knit. 

We have been learning about caring for Red Eared Sliders. 

Click here to view our eBook. 

We have been learning how to make a bee garden. 

Click here to see our eBook. 

We have been learning how to care for Green and Golden Bell Frogs.

Click here to see our eBook. 

I did an extra Kids Cafe presentation all about horses.

Click here to see my eBook. 

We have been learning about the SPCA. 

Click here to see our eBook.

We have been learning about dinosaurs. 

Click here to see our eBook. 

We have been learning how to knit, as well as how we can use our new learning to help babies and young children in South Auckland. 

Click here to see our eBook. 

Kids Cafe

We are lucky to now have five iPads in our classroom. We will be integrating these throughout the curriculum and our every day learning experiences. Over the past week the children have been learning how to create an eBook using My Story. I have been looking for ways for Room 8 to share what they create on the iPads with a wider audience. That's when I came up with the concept of Kids Cafe. 

The idea of Kids Cafe is to get more children teaching each other. I wanted to take down the four walls of our classroom, distance and time barriers. So I started connecting with teachers via Twitter. Soon a bunch of enthusiastic teachers came on board and were excited about giving Kids Cafe a go. There are quite a few teachers from different parts of NZ, as well as a teacher in Canada and one in Malaysia. Kids Cafe is an awesome opportunity for children to share what they're passionate about through literacy and connect with other classes on a global level. 

Kids Cafe runs on a four week cycle. 

Week 1 - children contribute their ideas for presentations to a Google doc. 

Week 2 and 3 - children create their presentations. This could be an eBook like we did, a YouTube clip, Google Presentation etc. 

Week 4 - Each class to run their own Kids Cafe Day in their class where children learn from other children all over the world, directly via the presentations. Note: these are all uploaded to a Google Presentation. They're either embedded or a link is provided. 

To find out more about Kids Cafe you can visit the blog - http://kidscafenz.blogspot.co.nz/

Diligence

The school virtue that we're focusing on at the moment is diligence. Diligence is working hard and doing the best that you can. When you are diligent you take special care with what you're doing to try to make things turn out right. Sometimes things don't turn out the way we want and that's okay. We can always learn from our mistakes, but being diligent means you put in 100% effort in and aim for excellence. 

After we had a class discussion about what diligence is we shared some examples of when we had been diligent. Here is what we came up with...

Being diligent is when you're...

• Baking cookies and you're trying really hard to make sure that you carefully follow the recipe so that your cookies turn out right. 
• Carefully planning and putting Lego pieces together to construct a Lego castle. 
• Focusing carefully on your dance moves and aiming for excellence. It's important to be diligent when you're dancing, because otherwise you could hurt yourself. 
• Trying your best to construct a sentence or paragraph correctly. You have to remember to try your best with spelling, punctuation and organising your ideas. 
• Working hard to improve your Maths on Maths Whizz by doing some at home or while you're waiting for the bus, as well as in class time. 
• Taking time with your learning and care with your presentation, instead of rushing it to try and do a quick job. 
• Trying again and again to get your horse to jump over the jumps so that you can lift them up to the next level. 

How can you show diligence this week? Don't forget to draw a picture and write a couple of sentences at home this week. You will get to share these on Friday. 

Tweets of the Week

Every week during the @Kidsedchatnz chat the teacher that moderates the chat looks for tweets of the week. This week Emily's tweet was selected to be one of the tweets of the week. Well done Emily!! Emily gets her tweet posted on the Kidsedchatnz blog and also gets to wear the Kidsedchatnz badge for a week. Here is the link to the Kidsedchatnz blog - http://www.kidsedchatnz.blogspot.co.nz/

Here is the Kidsedchatnz badge. 

First Term 2 Twitter Chat

Today we participated in our first Twitter chat for Term 2. The topic today was Outdoor Education. It was a flipped chat today. That means we watched a YouTube video before our chat. You can check out the YouTube video below. 




Then we discussed the Twitter questions in small groups and shared our ideas with the rest of the class. Here are the questions that we had to think about today: 

1. Do you agree with the people in this video on what outdoor education is? Why?
2. What do you think are the benefits of learning outside the classroom?
3. Do you think learning outside the classroom should be part of all the 'normal' lessons? Why?
4. Do you think going on a field trip is a good out of the classroom learning opportunity? Why?
5. Where would you like to go for a learning outside your classroom experience? Why?
6. Would you rather use a Virtual Field Trip instead of physically going to or visiting a certain place? Why/ why not?
7. What does your school do for outdoor education?
8. Outdoor education is about outdoor activities, but it is also about learning about the environment. Why is this important?

We all took turns at writing and tweeting a tweet today. Everyone had a turn at doing something. Miss Gentil helped us collect our tweets, by using Storify. Here are some of our tweets from today.