Global School Play Day 2019 #GSPD2019 in Room 7!

Global School Play Day 2019, aka #GSPD2019, was scheduled for Wednesday February the 6th... Waitangi Day in New Zealand, a public holiday.... so many classes participating from NZ did the Play Day on Thursday the 7th of February.  And so did Room 7.

I talked with my students several times about this leading up to the day.  We discussed the sorts of things they could bring and I emailed and sent a Seesaw message to the parents about the day too.  During the day I took photos to tweet to the #GSPD2019 hashtag and to Seesaw home to parents.

On the day we had four key words for the day: kindness, sharing, creativity and fun.  The children were also asked to respect the toys, especially the toys they were using that did not belong to them personally.

The only expectation in regards to the toys was not to bring any devices or electronic games.  Students could bring a game that had batteries if it was integral to the game, such as Operation for example.

Thankfully, no one brought any devices.  But one child brought a karaoke microphone.  And I can confirm that it projects sound quite impressively.

Other cool things the students brought with them included:

• blankets/sheets to make forts
• stuffed toys and dolls
• bubbles
• cars
• slime

I also had my classroom toys available, such as the Lego, blocks, garage and cars, trains, wooden magnetic games, water play, maths equipment like dominoes, kitchen play, shop play.... so much for the students to do.

    

Above and to the right you can see the students getting creative with Lego.  The Lego is very popular in Room 7, especially during wet playtimes.

Last year I was experimenting with Lego challenges for Literacy and Creativity.  I intend to use Lego this year for students to demonstrate their thinking in mathematics as well.

Some of my Lego is actual Lego, but I am eternally grateful to have supplemented some of it with the 'Play' brand from the Warehouse.  It just makes it that much more plentiful for the children to play with.  I was also able to source a Lego table via Facebook Marketplace last year which the children really like to use.

I always put the Lego books in with the Lego to give them ideas, but they are getting a bit munted.  So I may need to start putting them into a clearfile so they have more longevity.

Below the children are playing with their stuffed toys and my shop and kitchen toys.

One of the girls brought bubbles with her.  She and two other girls had a lot of fun playing outside our class in the area our caretaker fenced off with rope and fencing standards for our outdoor play area.

These children below were having a lot of fun with their stuffed toys and the shop and kitchen toys.

 It was very interesting for me to watch the children.  Things I took note of were:

• who different people played with
• what toys they gravitated to
• where in the class they played
• their co-operation skills
• their creativity
• their ability to problem solve.

One example of problem solving was building a blanket fort.  They worked together to make a big fort and figured out how to use the furniture to secure their blankets to make it stay in place.

      

And as you can see above, there was some major engineering and building works happening within the blanket fort too.

But not everyone used their blankets to make a covered fort.  Others used their blankets to mark their play territory within the classroom.

Some of the children enjoyed using the construction set with the screws and nuts to get creative....

I guess it doesn't take a genius to figure out slime would make an appearance at the Play Day...

It was nice to see our outside play area used for some good old fashioned handstands.

And a bit of Nerf gun warfare too.

The maths equipment was also popular.  The students in my class like to make domino trails to set off.

The cars and the garage were also a popular item and it's great to see the girls playing cars too.  Although at one stage they had the garage lined with stuffed toys and I was too slow to get a photo!

My magnetic toys got a good work out on the day too.  And the children creatively used their own toys in with the Lego to create what they wanted.

   

Over all I found the Global School Play Day to be a success.  We played from 9:30 through until 12:30 and the children worked well together.  Disagreements were few and I only had to remind people three times to share.  No one was bored and they were creative in their play.  I personally found the day quite relaxing, and I put it down to the fact that Room 7 is now a Year 3/4 class.

Most children brought toys with them from home, but some forgot.  But that was ok because sharing was one of our key words for the day and there was also plenty of classroom toys to play with.

Because it was in Week 2 of our school year, it was a great way for the students to build relationships, as I kept some children from last year, but the balance came from two other classrooms, one was completely new to the school and one was returning to the school after a year away.

Before the end of the day, I asked the students to give me some feedback about the day.  The overwhelming feed back was it was fun, that they got to play with other people and toys, making things was fun, being creative was fun and they made new friends.

I am now looking forward to #GSPD2020!

ULearn16: Keynote Speaker Two - John Couch

John Couch was the second Keynote Speaker at ULearn16.

This is the bio for John Couch from the ULearn Keynote Speaker information page:

John leads the Education business at Apple - his more than 40 years as a computer scientist and his advocacy for the use of technology in education has revolutionised learning in the classroom. At Apple, our dedication to learning has always been a part of our DNA.
Since joining Apple in 1978 as the Director of New Products, John went on to become Apple’s first Vice President of Software and Vice President and General Manager for the Lisa division, Apple’s first Graphics User Interface computer.
John has been heavily involved in the education market since 1985 and was Chairman of the Board at Santa Fe Christian School for 10 years. Under his leadership, the school’s annual losses were annulled and the student body grew from 150 to 1000.
John holds a Bachelor degree in computer science and a Masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science, both from the University of California at Berkeley where he was honoured in 2000 as a Distinguished Alumnus. He has also been awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters and a “Leadership in Innovation Award” from Philadelphia University.

I am going to use photos from John's presentation to illustrate most of my reflection as I was distracted by connection issues and thinking about my previous breakout during this Keynote.

 Why does your school exist?  What is the purpose of your school?  What is the vision.

"Nana I can not spend the night with you until you have wifi."  That's how I feel about going to someone else's house!

"When I went to school collaboration was called cheating.  Every project I was asked to do was as an individual."

Any institution that is based on average is doomed to fail.

There is not enough time in the week for a teacher to find the right educational learning activity for every child.  We are expected to meet the child with learning that is in their flow - but that's impossible.


This is the Storify of tweets for John Couch's Keynote below.  I didn't tweet very much as I was having connection issues.

Sadly, Storify has deleted itself from the Social Media scene, so all my Storify stories have gone.  😭😭😭😭😭

Matariki Art Overload!

One of the things I've missed doing in the last three years before I began my current position, was learning about Matariki with my very own class.  Last year and the year before I got to do a bit with classes I was relieving in.

I've blogged previously about Matariki.

• Matariki - an overview of a unit of work from 2012 when I had a Year 5-8 class.
• Matariki Art from 2016 when I was relieving in a couple of Year 5/6 classes.
• A touch of Matariki for 2017 when I relieved in a Y3/4 last year, which I recently published.

The school I now work at has a dedicated Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori in Week 9 of Term 2, designed to coincide with Matariki.  On the Wednesday we had Matariki workshops.  Our children were put into vertically mixed aged groups (Y1-8) to go around classes to do:

• te reo Maori 
• making rakau
• learning rakau games and songs
• waiata
• making a decorative Matariki karearea kite
• weaving paper Matariki fish.
• those paper plates with wool stars
• a colaborative Matariki mural

But before that day, a whole week before, I started my Matariki art.  Many students from Year 3-8 were off at a sports day, so the remains of two senior classes were distributed between the five junior classes.  So for the afternoon I decided to do art.

My motivation was this photo:

And you can see another variation at this blog post: Matariki Whetu - Stars for Matariki on the blog Nat Gets Nifty.

I simply put some A3 cartridge in a small pile and cut long triangles.  I then demonstrated how to use chalk to draw the initial design and how to use the pastels to get the students motivated.  Then I let them loose.

My next Matariki idea was a gluing activity.  This activity from Room 8 Pinehill School's Matariki Art Work blog post was my inspiration.

So off to David's Emporium I went and I purchased five sheets of different coloured sparkling paper.  I cut these into triangles of various size and put each colour in a different bag.  On the Friday we did this activity, I drew enough stars on black paper with chalk and roughly cut them out.  I emptied each bag into its own tray (thank you Chinese takeaways) and I have some PVA glue ready to go in the smallest deli containers from New World.  I demonstrated how to do this, stipulating that they shouldn't touch the chalk with the sparkly triangles and the sparkly triangles shouldn't touch each other.  My top tip was to start at each of the five tips of the stars before gluing back towards the middle.

Then came Matariki workshop day.  My motivation was Matariki kites and the karearea (aka the New Zealand falcon as seen on the $20 note.

  

I needed to make the activity something that children from NE to Year 8 could do.  Thank you Twinkl for having feather templates!!!  I downloaded those and allowed the students to choose the feathers they wanted to colour in.  I had a lot of colouring pencils which I put out on the trays from the Chinese takeaways and let the kids go for it.  For good measure I put on Hirini Melbourne's classic album He Waiata ma te Katoa as a background.

I was privileged to have two parents come into help me.  They had the job of cutting out the feathers.  And I had the job of gluing the feathers onto the template, which was a very crude bird outline on black A2 paper.  We ended up making two karearea.

I then found two circular Maori themed mandala designs for my a couple of students in my class to colour in for the head.  And then we added a coloured beak.  Alas I forgot to take a photo of this completed in the end.

When my class came back to me after lunch, I got them to explain what they had done in the other classes.  Inspired by what the other teachers had done, I decided I wanted to do some activities again with my own class for our display.  I was sure I could figure out the paper plate activity, but the fish paper weaving required me to get a tutorial from one of my colleagues.

So our first step was to paint the paper for our paper weaving (a great way to use up the paint in my New World deli containers before the term break).  I also gave them bits of sponge to splodge other colours on with and I sprinkled glitter over them.  The idea is to cut them into strips.  I've used the width of a medium width $2 Shop ruler to get a consistent size.

The paper plates are for the stars.  The children coloured them in with crayons and then painted over them with black paint.  Once they were very dry (several days later) we scratched pictures into the paint and I cut seven slits in around the edges of each plates.

I tied the wool on and the kids weave the wool through the slits to get the star shape.  Obviously, they have to do a wee bit of problem solving.  When the first colour ends I tie on another colour.  Our stars are just that little bit different to what they did in the other classes on purpose.

All those painted A3s up above were destined to be our Matariki fish.  I cut out each strip of paper after ruling them all up to the 2.5cm width of a ruler.

Each person needs six strips - three of one colour, three of another colour - as above.  In the pictures below, you will see that we folded each strip in half.

Then the weaving begins.

When we got to this point, I staped the fish.  The teacher I learned this from was using glue sticks, but I found it didn't work and went for the stapler for expediency.

Then I showed the children how to use draw fishy fin shapes on the flappy bits of the weaving and cut it out to get a fishier looking fish.

Eventually I got around to putting up the display....

I forgot to take a photo after I added the fish,  But it looked absolutely awesome - I may be a bit biased though.