More #Oresome in #LH4

Weeks 2-4 on Storify

Phew - a short week

The week may have only had four school days in it but we certainly packed in loads! After our Tuesday iDesign we have made some tweeks to our morning design,  we will now stop at 10:15am to pack up, share our learning, and read our poem as well as our Whakatauki before we go out for iActive. 

LH4 is now doing iActive at the same time as the rest of the school, previously we had found it very time consuming to participate in iActive as it took us way too long to pack up and get organised to be out the door in time. It's a bit like going out with your first child,  you can't imagine going anywhere without at least a day's notice and a containership load of supplies - but by the third child you can leave in a minutes notice and survive with some tissues and a manky muesli bar you found at the bottom of your bag.

Anyhoo back to iActive - Some of my thinkings/questionings/wonderings around iActive are "do we need to stop and deliberately be active?" Are we not already really active enough during our learning day? 

Well gone, are the days of enforced sitting while we learn, and the learners in LH4 are constantly on the go - proven by the fact that when I am in the Habitat, my Fitbit reaches 10,000 steps by lunchtime at the latest. It would be interesting to try the FitBit on some of our 'never sit still' learners!

I'm wondering if perhaps we need to rethink the purpose of iActive/fitness,  to be more about participating and contributing rather than enforced being 'active'. John Hattie (yes Kyle, that was an H bomb!) once said about the research around activity increasing academic ability that 'sometimes the fat kids are better readers/writers etc because that's what they spend their time doing'  Something to consider, however, to be fair most of the research I've read states there is definitely a correlation between physical activity and cognitive function.

In our world of ILE learning maybe iActive/Fitness is something we need to consider re-ideating to be more inline with our vision of: 

Guarantee every learner engages in innovative, personalised world class learning

Austin's Butterfly

Last week at our team meeting I shared the Austin's Butterfly video with my team members (Thanks Anne Keaneally for the tip)- I was interested in the team's take on the clip, particularly after I had watched our learners create a picture of their time at OrmPS, TBH I was underwhelmed by their efforts.

As a team we decided it would be good to share the clip with our learners and teach them explicitly about giving specific feedback. We showed our learners the clip and then divided the learners into groups of between 15/18.

The task we set our learners was to view and recreate the logo of a superhero. I showed my group the Batman logo and gave them 5 minutes to draw it, after they had completed their first draft (not a first giraffe as I had to explain) They then had 3 minutes each to share some specific feedback on how they could improve their drawing, after which they had 5 minutes to create a second draft.

I loved how they all took to the task and was super impressed with the level of feedback they were giving each other in such a short space of time - I was particularly impressed by the learners who can be hard to engage. The difference between their first and second drawing was huge, surpassing my expectations on all counts. 

As a team we have decided to spend three learning blocks on this task with the ultimate aim of having them use their feedback skills on all areas of their learning.

I will be interested to see what they produce on their 6th draft and if they can/do actually use their feedback skills in other areas of their learning.

Week 1 T4 2015

Weeks 9 and 10 in #LH4

More Oresome in #LH4

Another great learning week in #LH4. The learners are certainly much calmer now than they were 4 weeks ago. The more I think, learn and read about play-based learning the more I am convinced we are on the right track and the more I realise how much more I have to think, learn and read!

One of my main ponderings is; how can we best encourage the use of English in the Habitat? (24/28 are ELL) It seems to be mainly the boys that revert to using Chinese when playing but that could be because we have a much larger cohort of boys (22/28). They seem ok with using English when talking to English speaking adults but as soon as there are two or more Chinese speaking learners together they speak Chinese.

As being at school is often the only time they can speak English with fluent adult speakers, I wonder if we should we be encouraging them to speak English more often or should we leave them to converse in their native tongue as often as they do?
One of my frustrations is not being a fluent speaker of either Mandarin or Cantonese is around how we tell if the language they are using is at an age appropriate level or if they are using a low level of language.

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