Noumea sailing

Hi guys,

Have had three days of training with the coach and getting used to the conditions. Tomorrow is the regatta which is four days long. It is one of their major regattas.

It is very different sailing conditions. At 6am there is no breeze and steadily builds till 11am when it so windy we lose our hats. Then at about three it slowly begins to die.

Its really hot, we are drinking lots and lots of water. We start sailing at 10 and finish at 4. The teams from Wallis and Fortuna (North of Fiji) arrived yesterday and the Noumean team trained today.

At times it is quite hard to control the boat but alot of the time it is windy and very fun because we go really fast when we get surfing down the waves.

Sailing into the wind in heavy conditions will cause my boat to slowly tip and therfore I have to lean out of my boat and it looks something like this.

Yesterday our coach Briar spread Zinc on our faces and made cool designs.

We sailed this morning really early from 8am and then went to the aquarium in the afternoon.

In Noumea

Hi Guys its Craig here.

Just a quick blog post to let you know we made it to Noumea.

26+ degrees with strong winds for sailing. Excuse me if there are any mistakes. Typing on a French keyboard.

Twitter is magic!! Thanks to our supporters...

Hi everyone,

Just a quick little post from me.  Many of you may have heard of Twitter - a year ago I thought tweeting was a strange thing to do.  I must admit, I thought it was all about updating my friends about the mundane day to day things I'd been up to, not exactly compelling reading.  Then I had a go playing on Twitter, as a way to connect with other teachers... and now I'm hooked!

I've been amazed by how much learning has been sparked for me through Twitter - I love the feeling I get when I pick up an interesting piece of information, when I discover an exciting online tool, connect with a new person or am challenged in my thinking.  Learning Hub 3, you guys aren't the only ones that love learning, I assure you!

This evening Ken (who works as a manger at the Hamilton Zoo) got in touch with me to congratulate you all on reaching 20,000 blog hits and I very cheekily asked him for a favour.  

As you're all aware, Ruby and Paton are hard at work creating a fabulous wiki on endangered animals and Ken is happy for them to email questions through to him.  He's even going to put them in touch with the people who look after the native, exotic and endangered animals!!  

The internet allows people to make connections that otherwise wouldn't have happened.  I think we're so lucky to be learning in a time when information and experts are so accessible and even luckier that there are a growing number of people out there that are happy to make a difference by jumping in and helping us out.

I've been thinking recently and have been feeling so proud and excited to be part of such a giving community - we would not have made it to 20,000 hits within our first year had it not been for so many people taking an interest in what we're doing... many of these are people that we haven't even met in real life.

So thank you to all of our supporters for the encouragement and, well, support!  We think you rock!!

Getting out of the Pit!

Here at Stonefields we use our seven learner dispositions to help us when we get stuck in our learning.  Courtney made this great diagram to show how we get out of the pit!

We love to make mistakes and feel the stretch from being in the pit, because that's how we do our best learning.


Also, Finn and Courtney were invited to speak to a large group of professionals and did so last night - what an honor!

We've met our goal of 20,000 hits! Go us!!!

Hi it's Hossain here,

We have reached our goal number and we are going to have a huge celebration!

In term 3 we had 5,000 Pageviews and the teachers said that if we get to 20,000 we will have a party!

We got 20,000 by putting comments on other blogs and then they will comment on our blog, so we put more comments and got more pageviews.

Thank you very much everyone for your support - we love that you like reading our blog entries and we love writing it for you!  We want to keep blogging until we get a million hits because we love it that much!

Let's celebrate!!!!

Google Docs - are you in the cloud?

In LH3 we use Google Docs for a lot of our learning - it's an amazing tool that allows us to collaborate on the same document from anywhere, on any type of computer.

If you're not already using it (and it's free!) have a look at this video below and please ask us any questions.  We'd be happy to answer them for you!

and if you're familiar with Google Docs but haven't used the Forms option - take a look at this and have a go at making your own form next time you need to collect a whole lot of information from people...

Sid's Bath

Today after school  I needed to do a presentation at 4:30. But while I was waiting me and Miss Holland gave sid a bath.  We got the hot water and fulled it up to Sids shoulders so he could move around. I found out that some bearded dragons don't like getting water in there ears. I also found out that sid doesn't drink water it goes up his bottom so he can keep hydrated. While we were giving him a bath his skin changed to different colors but mostly yellow. We splashed water on his back to keep him warm. After that we quickly dried him in a towel so he can keep warm. I also got to give him some mealworms. Sid loves having a bath because it's nice and warm for him but he hates getting out of the bath because it's cold for him.

Giving Sid (our bearded dragon) a bath! on PhotoPeach

By Finn

The amazing Meal worm farm adventure!!!

Hi, it's Ben, Samo and Tearno.

We had a great adventure going to Animates, New World and Bunnings today.

We got lots of things such as mealworms, containers,and fruit as well as a couple of treats hehe. We came back and made our mealworms a house with oats, bran and newspaper.  To give them food we gave them sliced potatoes.

We hope they have a nice time along with us!

Getting our Meal Worm Farm Running! on PhotoPeach

Tessellation

This week we have been learning about tessellations with Miss Holland. A tessellation is when a shape is repeated over and over again covering a surface without any gaps or overlaps. First we cut out a rectangle, then we cut out a little shape on the top of the rectangle and translated it to the bottom. We traced our shape over and over again until it covered the whole page. Here's an example of a finished tessellation.

by Dasha and Meg

Pythagoras theorem

Hi  everyone,

Damien, Hana, Paton, and Fatima have been learning about the Pythagoras theorem. First we built our knowledge about the hypotenuse, and we started learning about how you use the Pythagorus rule to find out the hypotenuse. The hypotenuse is the longest line in a right angle triangle.  Yesterday when Miss Holland taught us, we were all confused. But the more we practiced, the more it got clarified.  We learnt that it only works with right angles. Today we had another lesson teaching us that you don't need one of the formulas to figure out the answer, you can use the same formula but you just need to reverse (a^2 + b^2 = C^2) (a^2 = b^2 - c^2) 

We were all in the pit at some time in the process, but in the end we had a breakthrough! We had a lot of struggle but with the help of others and our peers especially our teachers because with their help, (once again)we had a breakthrough!

This is what they might look like:

It's not long until the election...

I wonder, can you work out what this image means?  What can you find out about the voting history here in New Zealand?

Cat scan *giggle*

Just for fun!  Do you know what a real 'cat scan' is?

Litter free lunchboxes

Today on Wednesday the 21 of November the Klean Kiwis Enviro group went downstairs and checked students' lunchboxes. We did it sneakily, they didn't know!

We had been set the challenge to leave litter at home and bring our lunches in unwrapped. Some people did a great job (especially Hub 1!) and others forgot.

Learning Hub 3, we'd love to win this challenge because we want the mascot! You can do it!!

Here are some graphs to show the information we found and next time we do the check we'll let you know how things go.

See ya next time! From Dani and Alex

Making Meaning of eLearning tools and our Learning Process...

I've been thinking a lot about web 2.0 tools and general ICTs (Information Communication Technologies) and have been wondering how I could link them visually for you all - it's one thing having them written down but I wanted more.

So today I've been Building my Knowledge around Photoshop and Dreamweaver (after my Twitter friend, Stephanie suggested I give it a go) and have had a go at making a visual eLearning Process based on our Stonefields Learning Process.  My next step will be to link each individual logo... would you rather see them linked directly to their website or to the info I've written on them?

So far I've only loaded up the logos for the tools that I've done write-ups on but remember, if there's a tool that you love, please comment here (or in the web 2.0 tool page) and I'll load yours up too!

Would anyone like to join me for an ELO on Dreamweaver?  It's a web design programme made by Adobe and will be what I use to link each different part of this one image to different websites.  I have limited knowledge myself but I can share what I've learnt today and we can help each other!

Do you think this is something that you would make use of?  Or would you be just as happy only having the list?  (PS - right now the links aren't working but they will soon)

Take a look at this image!

This is one of the most tweeted images this week (by @AmoreTiffany) - it shows how someone who has a relatively small following (at the time under 1000 people) can get their message (or in this case, image) out into the world.  Don't ever feel like you're not well-known enough to make a difference in the world!

What feelings does this image invoke in you?  How does it make you feel?

Happy 100th student, Stonefields!

Today Stonefields celebrated hitting our 100th learner!  Have a look at all the fabulous photos from our fun afternoon...

QR Codes and maths!

Hello,

 

For maths, the people who learnt about compasses had a continuous lesson today and we used our prior knowledge to help us through a treasure quest to find a prize. This proved if we really knew everything about North, South, East and West etc...

We got split up into two groups; one with Jamie, Fatima, Paton, Damien and Alex and the other with Leo, Dasha, Nathan, Damien and Hana. We had turns finding the treasure. To finish the quest we had use a compass (Miss Holland had one on her phone) and a scanner. Now you must be wondering what the scanner does to help us finish, well we had codes all over the school and we had to take a photo of it with the iPad and the clue automatically appears on the iPad. The clue would contain something along the lines of head 3.5 meters NNW and some of them were fake ones to make things extra tricky!

We enjoyed doing this and it's good that we applied our understanding with what we learnt! We had to work as a team and this was sometimes challenging but we think we did a really good job and got there in the end. This was a great maths lesson!

From Miss H:  Hi everyone, QR codes are 2D barcodes that are able to hold a range of information (secret squirrel style!) from URLs, to text messages.  You're able to download apps free of charge to allow you to scan and 'read' the secret messages... here's one!  If you open it up on your iPhone, iPod, iPad etc.  you'll find it will take you straight through to our hub blog on your portable device.

... and the winning team was TEAM B!  They came in at 16mins and 30sec and Team A took 18mins - almost too close to call!  Well done everyone  :)

PS: Check out 3/4G's blog to see what they've done with QR Codes - here's what they have to say about them...

"The QR stands for Quick Response.  The special codes contain information, just like barcodes at the supermarket do – they contain information about the price.  You can add all sorts of information to QR codes, like links to websites, videos, maps, contact details, text and much more. 

All you need to figure out what information is locked in the code, is a smartphone, like an iPhone or Android, or iPod touch with a camera, or even a desktop or laptop with a web cam.  You will also need a special scanning app – there are lots of free ones on the iTunes store, or computer software call Mark Book.  

It’s quite simple really!  All you need to do, is scan the code or take a photo of it with your special scanning app, and it will read the code for you!  Tah-dah!  It will take you to where the info is stored!"

Well done LH3 - you've been nominated for Best Class Blog!!

Hi everyone, I have very exciting news to share with you!!  We've been nominated by Stephanie (who writes a fabulous blog herself and came to meet us in the hub not too long ago) for the Best Class Blog in the EduBlog Awards!!

This is very exciting for us and down to all of your hard work (not that it's been work!) and focus - many of you have shown great determination in making our blog something we're all very proud of and should be congratulated!!

Well done Learning Hub 3, I'm very proud of you  :D

Who do you think we might nominate?  Have a look at the Edublog Awards Blog to see the different nomination areas - let's spread the love!

The amazing mealworm clan: How to breed them!

Hi everyone, it's Tearno, Tobias and Samo here! Today we've been surfing the web to find a mealworm breeding video and we have found amazing facts about how to breed them!  We thought we could breed them to feed our lizard, Sid, because right now Miss Holland buys all of them.

(PS they don't really have eyes like this!)

These are some of the things that we've learnt:

• You need moisture when you breed them (which comes from bread, carrot and potato) and something for them to hide under (like toilet rolls.)
• They use oats to cover the bottom of the containers.
• It doesn't take that long for a mealworm to hatch.
• Mealworms start as larvae, and then they become a cocoon that hatches into a mealworm and that hatches into a beetle. That's if Sid doesn't eat the mealworms first!
• It's good to have three containers or drawers. You keep the different types in different draws or containers because otherwise the older ones eat the younger ones!!!!

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We're feeling very confident about breeding mealworms and we think it will be lots of fun because we get to grow lots of them which is better than buying them! We love holding bugs and learning about them so this is very fun for us.

By the time we got back onto TradeMe the breeding beetles had been sold to someone else but we're going to keep looking so we can get some ourselves.  This is what the auction looked like.  If you notice more could you please let us know by leaving a comment below.

What would you like to know about mealworms or about breeding them? We'd love to help you and we will find out the answers to your questions (unless they are stated here!)

Here is a video that we watched that was awesome. We learnt a lot from it!

We also read this website here.

Tutorial: How to use DocScan!

 

Have you ever needed a scanner but couldn't work out how to use the hub one?  It can be a bit tricky especially if you don't know the code or haven't used it for a while!  Sick of waiting in long lines?

Well do we have the solution for you!  Have a look at this tutorial that Maddy and Alex made to show you how to use DocScan (for iPhones, iPads and iPods)... if you ever want to use it, just ask to borrow Miss Holland's phone!

What a fabulous video, thanks girls!

PS: Once you're finished, click on the 'send icon' and choose how you'd like to send it - the girls sent it through email as PDF.  This is the icon that you're looking for...

 

Noumea sailing

Hi Its Craig here

If you haven't been following my posts on my sailing I have been selected to go to Noumea for the development squad. I am going in Nine Days!!

I am so excited because I hear that it is so warm and the water feels like a spa when you hop in. We have a day of tourism over there and the boys from the Noumea Development Squad said windsurfing is a must do over there.

I can't wait.
I need to learn French (Pity we are learning Spanish) and the Haka because we are representing New Zealand.
Does anyone know the Haka and can teach me!

Thanks for looking after Sid today!

Thanks to everyone for making Sid feel so loved today!  I think he's enjoyed being back at school and having company during the day - he finds the days at my house pretty boring!

Here are two of my cats keeping an eye on our Sid out in my backyard...

 

Skyping and Shuffling!

Hi everyone,

I would have loved for our learners to post about this but they've all gone home for the weekend and this is just too neat to wait!  This afternoon some of us Skyped room 12 from Riverina School which is  nearby us in Pakuranga, Auckland.  They asked us some great questions and gave some excellent feedback on our dancing videos (they said they especially like how we dance in different places, which got us thinking that maybe we could dance at the wetlands!) and we enjoyed introducing them to Sid and getting to know them...

They're getting ready for a dance festival later in the year and shared this video of them dancing with us - aren't they amazing dancers!!  I love that each of them have their own unique style.  What do you think?

Sharing our learning about Endangered Animals!

Hi everyone, it's Paton and Ruby here. We have started creating a website (wiki) about endangered animals called www.endangeredanimalsworldwide.wikispaces.com/ We have been watching documentaries, reading websites and have emailed lots of different zoos and animal rescue organizations around the world - we hope to Skype them soon and have them answer our questions so we can share our findings with you!

Please visit our site - we're very excited to get people reading it. We'll continue updating it as we learn more so please check back again soon. If you have any suggestions please let us know.

From Paton and Ruby

Learning about Haiku Poems

We've been using the Inquiry Model to learn all about different types of writing this term. One group wanted to do poetry so we've been researching and finding out what we need to know to be able to write awesome poems. It's been fun being able to build our own knowledge!

Today we worked with Miss H and talked about Haiku poems. We found out that they are Japanese poems and most of them are about nature. Often the first idea seems like it doesn't have much to do with the last idea. They are not rhyming poems and if the sentence doesn't fit on one line, you can fit the rest of it on another. When you read a Haiku, you only pause where there are commas, fullstops and dashes, you don't stop just because it changes line. We use a capital letter at the beginning of each line like in all poems.

We learnt that Haiku's have three lines. The first one has five syllables, the next one has seven syllables and the last has five syllables. You can join two or more Haiku's together if you like to make a longer one.

A syllable is when you've divided a word into parts that sound right. Here is an example of me clapping out the syllables in this Haiku poem from the internet.

As the wind does blow

Across the trees. I see the

Buds blooming in May.

We looked at examples from this website and thought they were good ones and then we applied our understanding and made our own ones!! Here are some of them - we're still working on them. What do you think so far?

By Hossain

(PS - Hana taught up about Tanka poems which are very similar but have two extra lines at the bottom, both with seven syllables. So it's 5, 7, 5, 7 and 7 syllables.)

As the birds flap in

The sky, the wind blows them away

Into the distance.

(by Hossain)

Cherry blossoms bloom

As the sun stops hiding

Behind the grey clouds.

(by Dani)

As the heat rises

While the frost turns to dew,

The buds blossom out.

(by Tearno and Nathan)

Maths - WALHT Describe how a pattern was created

We've been learning about geometry in maths this term and today we focused on learning how different patterns are created.  We built our knowledge on rotating, translating and reflecting and applied our understanding today by looking at designs that we were given.  We had to decide how the patterns were formed based on what we'd learnt.

We then discovered that Leo had never made a paint butterfly (mirrored - gasp!) so we quickly made one to demonstrate how symmetry and mirror images work to help him understand.

Most of us found the second and third designs the most challenging to work out - they were based on translation and reflection, but we got there in the end with collaboration!

Once we practiced a few examples, we created our own patterns by folding square paper (either straight or on the diagonal) into quarters.  We then cut out sections (being careful not to cut off a whole edge) and unfolded the paper.  We discovered that by doing this that the pattern is mirrored/reflected along each fold (so every square had a mirrored pattern on either side of it) and the opposite square is the same image rotated 180.

Here are our patterns that we created and a photograph to help you understand...

(Click to enlarge)

By Jamie, Paton and Hana

Builders Collaborating

We saw builders working as a team, as they were passing the tiles to the guy on the roof, so he could place them on the roof. So then Damien and I went down with Miss Holland, to ask if you could do the job on their own, and I quote ''No, it could not be done on our own." Why?  Because it would take a lot of time for one person to have to get the tiles to the roof. There would be a higher risk of the builder falling off the ladder. When there are lots of builders working as a team, it will be easier and faster to get the roof tiled.

changes in hub 3

Hi everybody this term we have been using different things like google docs on the computer, google calendars, google sites and emails to help us in our learning. Recently we have been using google calendars to know whats happening through out the day. We think that google calendars are very useful because every time the teacher wouldn't have to tell us what to do so we can get straight into it. But sometimes when you look at your calendar, the teachers only get to fill in what you're doing in the morning.

By Meg and Edwin

Skyping Wisconsin (St. John Vianney)

Yesterday morning we rushed into school early to meet with some of our blog buddies, a school in Wisconsin called St. John Vianney.

Here's Dasha to tell you more about it!

We all came to school very early and it was quite amazing and exciting to see how many people were there.  They asked us a lot of questions (some of the ones we were going to ask) and next time we're looking forward to asking our questions because we ran out of time.  There were a lot of students in that class and I was amazed that in grade 6/year 7 they switch teachers for each class.  We don't do that in New Zealand until year 9!  It was neat to talk with people with American accents because I have a Canadian accent.

We had a really great time but sometimes it was a little hard to hear people because we all talked at the same time.  We loved Skyping with St. John Vianney and it was interesting to hear how differently they do things at school (some things are the same though with our lives, like the music and the movies we like.)

By Dasha

Thanks St. John Vianney for all of your comments on our blog - we think you ROCK!  (Miss H)

Presentation tool: Sock Puppets

Hi everyone,

Today I was reading Mr Beehre's blog and he shared an ap called Sock Puppets - I had a play and I'm in love with it!

How do you think we could use this ap?  Take a look at Mr Beehre's post to get a rundown of how to use it (he's done such a great job explaining it that I'm not going to!)

Shuffling virus update (it's spreading!)

Hi,

This is the expansion of the old Spongebob Shuffling dance!  I has spread through more of the hub... where might it spread next?  We'd love to see your dancing movies so please leave a comment with the link!

Thanks, from Damien H and Matthew

Keen to join the 100 Word Challenge?

It's very exciting that we're each able to choose our own writing focus this term!  I came across this tonight and thought it might be an exciting addition to your timetables - it wouldn't matter too much if it fits with your selection or not as I'm sure you'll have a little spare time in your timetable to fit it in.

Each week the 100WC blog puts up a prompt for you - sometimes a sentence, other times a word or two, or it could even be a picture.  You spend the week writing (100 words max, so it's only quite short!) and then we post your writing to our blog... we also let their head office know each time we've posted some writing and they come onto our blog to check it out and comment!  You can connect with other students overseas too and see what they've done with the same starter.

This could be a great way to build on the creative writing that we started the year with.  If you'd like to know more, take a look at 100WC and leave a comment below!

Don't forget the comma!

Remember the post we put up a month or so back?

Well, here's a fun little video to show what the difference between 'let's eat, Grandpa' and 'let's eat Grandpa' is... amazing what one comma does!

Thanks to 'The Skinny' for sharing this.

Have a look around our hub!

Hi everyone,

This is a photo for those of you who have heard of our blog or school but haven't actually seen what our hubs look like...

It's a panoramic photo which means that you can look around the whole space by clicking and dragging.

Have fun exploring!

From Paton