Visiting Author

Last week a visiting author named Raymond Huber came to the school to talk to the senior classes. He has had over twenty books published and he showed some of these to the students. After that, he led a workshop with the children in which he explained how he goes about writing a story and introduced the children to some new planning techniques. He was impressed with some of the students' writing and gave them some feedback about what they had done well and some suggestions about other ways of improving their writing. He showed us how he goes about editing his work and explained the importance of writing a good introduction which sets the scene for the story. It was a very interesting session and the children were enthusiastic about trying to use what they had learnt in their own writing.

Global Classroom Update

Throughout the year the children in Room 8 have maintained a penpal relationship with children from a class at Excelsior Elementary near Sacramento in California, U.S.A.

We recently completed a collaborative investigation of the gold rush with the children engaged in face to face discussions with their American buddies using google hangouts. It was very interesting to be doing this in real time even though it was 9.00am on Thursday here and 2pm Wednesday afternoon there! This will be our last interaction with them for a while as their school year is now over and they won’t start again until they return from their summer break in mid August. We will look forward to catching up with them again then.

Board Games

We have been learning about the importance of rules in any community in order for things to run smoothly.

For the last few weeks our challenge has been to design our own original board game. One of the most important tasks has been to write a set of rules that can be easily understood so that people can play the game without having to be shown how to do it.