Oral Lanugage

Miss Smerdon had the fabulous idea of running an oral language programme each day in Learning Hub 3, and we love it!

Our learners take turns at filling each roll and every morning a few people present their on their area of expertise or findings (I'll let our students fill you in on the specifics of each role a little later on.)

For now, enjoy these videos showing off three of our talented presenters.

Damien shares his recent science experiment...

Damien Oral Language Science from Sarah Holland on Vimeo.

Our other Damien fills us in on roller hockey, his favourite sport...

Damien H Oral Lang from Sarah Holland on Vimeo.

and finally, Finn investigates a recent news story and shares it with us (you can find one of the original articles on the NZ Herald here)

Oral Language Finn from Sarah Holland on Vimeo.

Starting Science Fair...

Today the year 7 and 8 students carried out an experiment to test dishwashing liquid and it's effect on different liquids (in this case, milk, water and apple juice.)

The seniors were introduced to some key words and researched them before knitting together what we found to give a definition we would all understand.  They started to give examples of each term under the headings (eg. they had a go at writing their own hypotheses once they understood what one actually was.)

They're still working through the details but you can click on the following image to see the document that they're all working on.

See how we got on here (photos):

Moving Milk! on PhotoPeach

and video:

Learners, what did you guys think of the experiment and your learning?

Trying to get shade for our school...

The year 7 and 8 students have been given a very exciting challenge! Stonefields needs shade over our playground area to protect our amazing students from the sun.  The only problem?  Shade isn't cheap!  The seniors of the school have been investigating how we might get some funding to help pay for the shade.  We were told that McDonalds might like to help out, so we've been doing some investigating.

First we phoned directory to get the number for the new McDonalds up the road (after writing a script, talking about different possibilities and roll playing the call):

... but they couldn't help!  So we tried phoning head office (after we found the phone number through 'google'):

Success!  So we phoned the owners of McDonalds but they're out of the country right now.  We got the email address of another person and will send them an email.

Stay tuned....

Finn, Nathan and Fatima