Sharing my Inquiry at Staff Meeting

This week I did a staff meeting on my inquiry. My Inquiry is about writing and how I have focussed on vocabulary to raise the writing levels of my students. The feedback that I got from the inquiry was very positive. Here is the presentation that I shared with the staff.



The highlights were -

• How can I set my students for success every time.
• Why vocabulary is so important for children to learn.
• How can I design rich tasks for students to recycle new vocabulary.
• How I track my students progress. 

COA - Lesson 10

This lesson was a follow up from the previous lesson on Manaiakalani Google class on Air. In this lesson children have come up with ideas on how to lift people's spirits in an event of a natural disaster.

My reflection - 
It was a good lesson as students could think outside the square. They came up with some very original ideas like - making something from debris, singing songs together and playing music to calm themselves. It was great to listen to one of the students who came up with an idea of staying together as it symbolises strength. When I further questioned on how they could show this through Art, they had several ideas to share like - painting people together, families together and a bunch of flowers. I am very excited about how students can now easily relate to Art and try to represent their ideas through Art.

One of the ideas was to paint a tree of togetherness. Just as the leaves of the tree stick together, we should also stay together in times of disasters because together we can remain strong and can overcome all difficulties. The black colour represents hard times and the white represents strength.

Click here to view the extended lesson plan and complete episode.

COA Lesson 9

This term we have been learning about Natural disasters. In this lesson we have learnt about how people feel when they are in a natural disaster. Children have created a word mural to share what they see, hear, smell, feel and taste during such times.

The learning outcome for the lesson was - Understand how natural disasters affect the life of people and those around them.

Reflection - It was really great to see one of the groups plan to make a piece of Art to share people's emotions. This idea was liked so much by the class that they all pitched in to make a big mural with all sense words. They decided to paint a slip in the middle of the mural to show an earthquake.

Here is a word mural that we made.

Click here to watch the complete episode.