Saturday 26 August 2017

Farewell Aimee

The last of our international students left on Friday.  It was a pleasure to host you, Aimee

Saturday 19 August 2017

Sophie and Jared shine at Speech Final

Sophie's speech about a world without wifi left the audience nervous!  What would would you do if there was no youtube?
What's next?  Looking to the future has Jared choosing to live in the present

Thursday 17 August 2017

Creating a menu to sate a leprechaun ... and get him talking about all his secrets

Here's a taste tester (get it?) of some of menus, and portions of menus, that were created by the kids in order to charm the leprechaun that visited.

A significant amount of research went into creating the perfect menu, considerable thought went into using language to get his greedy little mouth watering, while an attractive page layout sealed the deal. Our leprechaun was more than happy to submit to being interviewed.  (Some of the interviews have been put on our blog, so, if you're curious, scroll down.

We all ordered from the menus that were presented.  Few could go past the mini shepherd's pie

Carrageen pudding anyone?  Ruby, I loved the addition of the shamrock

Front of Jacob's menu

Fine fare on offer at Irish Dream

A portion of Angie's menu.  When we placed our orders (imagining we were seated in the restaurant) most passed on the black pudding offering!


And the award for outstanding performance in a comedic role goes to.....

Angie for her highly believable interpretation of an interviewer


Best picture award goes to ..... Jacob, Carol and Nicholas

Wednesday 16 August 2017

Goodbye Rachel!

 It was a pleasure to have you in our class, Rachel.  Good luck for the upcoming school year back in China.
Hope to see you again... and soon

Tuesday 15 August 2017

In pursuit of all things green and shiny ...

Amazing leprechaun trap by Jacob.  Wowsers!


The purpose of this collaborative learning task was to help the children to see how by combining the individual strengths of the individuals in a team great outcomes can be achieved.

All the groups have worked on scripts, detailing their interactions with a wily leprechaun, and designed their own menus, offering Gaelic fare, in order to charm the leprechaun out of his gold.
The kids have also designed traps, researched the history of leprechauns, and created a spreadsheet showing how they would spend the pot of gold should they secure it.

All of these activities were designed to promote critical and creative thinking skills.   Those children who excel at maths worked out the capacity of the pot and then worked out how many gold coins it was likely to contain.  They researched the weight of an average gold coin and then worked out the current value of gold in order to calculate how much money they would have to spend.

The menus are beautifully crafted.  The creative children experimented with a variety of fonts and formatting when finishing the carefully researched dietary needs of an Irish faerie.  The history of the leprechaun has been presented in Google Slides and the traps were designed in Google Draw but constructed using hard materials.

Because of the range of activities, and the varying skills required for successful task completion, there was something for every type of learner.



Jared, Karthiga and Samuel presenting their leprechaun script. The audience loved it and it was laughter all round.  Well done guys.

Thursday 10 August 2017

Wacky Mufti - Dressing weird for Kidscan

Underwear as outerwear - all the rage on the catwalks in Paris (said nobody ever)
Rocking it in Room 2.  Nothing new there then
Twinsies - the long and the short of it

Wednesday 2 August 2017

Pounding the Pavement - teaching the legs who's boss

Cross-country training has begun in earnest (every Tuesday and Friday).  There are those who love it (admittedly few) and those who hate it, but everyone in Room 2 managed it with a smile (it could have been a grimace, I guess?) when cross-country kicked off on Tuesday.

Those who dig deep, set themselves a goal to run hard, and then manage to run a lap or two without stopping always beam with a certain pride, and that was evident during the first warm down.

There are those who can't quite manage the whole course yet, but with the determination to improve their fitness it won't be long till they are running like pro marathon runners (okay, maybe not quite, but still...).

Go hard Room 2! :-)