My class Blog 2010

I'm feeling really excited after getting all permissions from my children's parents to set up a blog. A new class blog for 2010! It is really early in the year and so lots of the work will be done by me with the children. Hopefully later in the year children will use tools to show their learning independently. Anyway, here is the link. Please do visit us and leave a comment or some ideas that we could do.

Over the Rainbow...

Cluster LT day

We started by members sharing ideas fom Learning @ schools. It was nice to hear about these ideas. BJ then reintroduced us to Action Research which sounds really exciting, although I need to read up and look at work other people have done. Wish I had more time in the day! AR starts with a problem and then we find ways to solve or minimise the problem. Our team have come up with incorporating e-learning into the literacy programme. We will work on this all year.

Lead Teacher Release

A very fruitful 3 days. The focus being e-portfolios. My teams were busy setting up goals and success criterias for their pupils. I worked alongside children supporting them to log in and type in their goals on their K-net page. Wow! the year 2's were really onto it. Lots of them were able to log in with just alittle help/reminder and after being at school for a year they could recognise the letters to use the keyboard to input their goals. I was really amazed and enjoyed watching them do this. Well done to all our teachers last year that helped these kids. Your efforts have paid off. The children can only get better from here on. Some Year 1 classes had sessions with me to learn to log in using a username and password. They were eager to do this. The rest of the time I put in goals for classes. I also showed my class how to use Photo booth and take pictures of buddies to put on their More about me page. The looks and excitement in their eyes and voices was something not to be missed. Hopefully everyone benefitted from this release. I got to see  different ways goals and success criterias were written and got to meet alot of kids from the syndicate.

2010

YES! It is a new academic year next week, just can't wait to get started, well not quite, as I am still jet-lagged after my trip to my hometown, India. It was a great time with family and friends. Anyway, it's back to work or should I say, back to what I love doing! Looking forward to meeting my new little guys and working with them. I'm sure it's going to be another great year of learning and doing fun things together. We will first learn the basics of using a digital cam. This year I aim to let kids investigate for themselves and for them to show/teach me ICT skills, instead of me telling them straightaway how something is done.
On the other hand, I am a bit nervous about my role this year especially as I have two teams to support. Will try my best to be useful, supportive and available.

The Year Gone by!

This year has been a great year in my teaching career. I have achieved more personally and with my class. It started with e-portfolio and I feel good that the kids have had ownership and involvement this year. It has been a hard road getting 5 year olds to understand the concept, teach them reflection and typing skills when most of them did not even know the letters of the alphabet. Time has also been a big factor as there is always so much to do in the day. I have tried lots of new things this year that I felt apprehensive about in the past years. They have all been successful and I have seen the results. Parents have shown appreciation for things we have done in our class. The highlight was our class blog, although in the past few weeks I am having problem uploading to Blogger. Soon it is going to be the end of the year and I just can't wait for the hols... It's so sad that I have to send my amazing brainy bunch to another teacher next year.
I have applied to be a lead teacher next year. I am looking forward to it.

Some thoughts

Term 3 has been a very fruitful one with my class trying out new ict tools. Their oral language and sentence structure has improved and even my shy children want to read to the class. This is the last term of the year, yeh!!! Well I still have so much I want to try out with my little guys. Hopefully I will be able to do this. Another thing I need to practise is coaching skills to support my team so I will be able to really guide them to integrate e-learning tools into their programmes next year. I am so lucky to be in a supportive school, its what keeps me learning and trying new things and this benefits the children under my care.

Interface Magazine Blog Awards

My class blog has been chosen as one of the 5 finalists for the INTERFACE Awards 2009, 'Best Class Blog'. If you are in the education sector in NZ, please click here to vote for The Brainy Bunch, Room 3 at Elm Park School.

Feedback on class blog

I am so glad I set up a class blog. It has served
its purpose and I have got positive comments from my children and their parents.
Read on, remember you can watch this full screen.
We love our blog...

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Final Cluster day

Today once again we started by sharing an idea of how we use ict in our classrooms. I shared how my kids and I use voicethread to share our learning with parents. One of our members shared this website http://www.pricespy.co.nz/ that I thought was very useful when you want to buy equipment for schools. Then BJ shared ideas about using peer coaching. This means supporting each other to reflect on practice and identify ways to improve practise. I think peer coaching gets effective with practise, it was very hard to peer coach someone as we often tend to advise people and tell them what to do instead of encouraging them to come up with something!

I would like to explore the digital software so that I could use digital content with my students. A lot of this was new to me and I need some time to think about it.
Overall a very fruitful day!

The Big move!!!

Since I have a class blog now all kids' work will be displayed there. Kindly visit The Brainy Bunch and leave your comments for my 5/6 year olds. Sorry I had to move my slide shows due to technical problems.

My busy brainy bunch

The last 2 weeks have been really great, getting the kids excited about their blog. We have had lots of visitors and the children are encouraged to do better at speaking up, writing stories and sharing what they have learned. They love listening to their voices and seeing their work displayed on the www along with reading the comments. I have already seen children grow in confidence orally and can see that they eagerly decode to read the shared book. They are learning from mistakes they have made in earlier recordings. They remind each other about this. I feel pleased that the podcasts, videos or voice threads that we create are integrated into our literacy programme. Nothing is done as a stand alone. It can be done!- Thoughtful and Detailed Planning is the key.
I would appreciate new ideas of how to do voice threads and podcasts with my class.

Class Blog

I have finally set up a class blog. The sole purpose of this is to showcase children's work, encourage their oral language and give them an authentic audience.
Here is the link: The Brainy Bunch
Please visit and leave a comment! Cheers

Learning, learning, learning!

Wow! 2 days of PD. What a lot of learning. Having a cluster conference at our school was amazing. It was nice to work with and listen to like minded people and see the thirst that teachers have to learn new skills! I am so glad I was a part of it. Well done to people that organise these. Can't wait to start school and work with my little people. Hopefully all goes well this term.

Our Learning

Thursday was an exciting day for me because it showed me how much my class had learned in Term 2. At the start of the term I had asked my class what they knew about changes and they were able to only tell me about behavioural changes. I had to probe for the others. Then at the end of term I got a whole list of things they had understood about changes and this was without any probing or questioning. What was amazing to see was that my quiet kids and non English speaking kids responded too! The children were able to explain what they said.I have put up the 2 brainstorming photos.

Chocolate

Our class made chocolate, to do with our inquiry CHANGES.
We brainstormed words to describe chocolate and did this on
Wordle. The kids loved it!