It is halfway through Term 3 already. I have a whole bunch of photos to put on so rather than write, I'll put captions with the photos.
These show Te Reo is still a regular Wednesday lesson, and as Pam and I are alternating teaching each session, I absolutely have to be organised with a prepared lesson, practising pronunciation beforehand, and gathering or making resources. I'm feeling much more confident in this area, although I do have to keep returning to previous sessions and reminding myself of what I've learnt along with the students. I can't seem to retain all of the language I teach, but I guess unless you use it consistently, it is easy to forget. We each have a scrapbook where we glue in photos, printed resources and info about each lesson to help remember what we've done and to extend in the future. Perhaps next year I'll set a goal to use each new word or phrase at least several times a day. Then it might stick! In my head.
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| A Matariki activity relating to the stars |
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| String games |
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| Cat's Cradle was a huge hit with the children. |
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| Action songs |
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| Fortune Tellers in Te Reo. I'd spelled seven wrong when I made them, whetu instead of whitu, luckily Pam noticed. Or we could just be Room Star in English! |
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Tuakana-teina is one Room 7s favourite parts of the week. Although
they are working with the juniors in Room 3, and the activities they are
"teaching" or learning to do together are junior oriented, my senior
students really enjoy this time to work alongside the littlies! And
PLAY!
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| Elephants! |
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| They were a bit cute! |
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| Woven turtles |
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| Matariki inspired lanterns |
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| Finger puppets |
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| Flying owls |
Our second Mantle for the year has only really just begun and will continue into Term 4. The first step or "hook" was altered from my original plan after hearing Leslee share what staff had learnt when they went to see Tim Taylor speak. Now I'll definitely have more than one hook leading in to our paper making (which I'm just so excited about starting properly, I've got some super cool things we can do with this!).
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| This is the image we started with. I asked the children to write a quick paragraph after studying the image, explaining what what happening in the picture. |
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| Groups wrote on sticky notes and put their ideas on the image. |
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| Here are a few ideas! |
The discussion surrounding this image was awesome. I sat and listened to each group trying to make sense of what each person depicted in the scene was up to. Some of their ideas: redecorating, looking for gold/oil, bricklaying - it was really funny hearing them explain and justify their ideas to each other. I wonder what I would have come up with if I didn't know they were making paper. That "fish" that's being chopped up... "you can see it's a fish, there's its tail!"
