Power Play - Ukulele

Last Wednesday all of the kids who had made an honest effort to complete Fast Track got rewarded with a power play. For this power play they got to spend 30 minutes learning the Ukulele with Miss G.

Some of them had never held a ukulele and within 30 minutes they were ready to perform. We hope you enjoy their performance below.

Traditional Teaching Style (TTS)

I Hate Traditional Teaching Style!

By Anneka Cai

NOO! It was a Tuesday morning and everyone was gathered outside the classroom. I was wondering what everyone was doing and I pushed through the crowd and saw that the classroom had been transformed into a horror movie. The tables were put in lines and there were stickers that had our names on them. Then I saw a sign that said “DO NOT COME IN UNTIL 8:50am.” I was terrified.

The teachers started to walk down the quad, dressed in clothing that looked like it was from the 1980s. Mr Robertson shouted “ LINE UP HERE NOW!” The whole class was horrified. Like minions we scattered across the court and lined up in boy and girl lines.

When we got into the classroom the first thing I saw was piles of math books, dictionaries and more dictionaries! When we got seated in our seats the teachers told us to stand up and sing the National Anthem. The class stood up and sang. After that the teachers shouted at us and gave us glares .”I couldn't wait to get home“ I thought.

The National Anthem made me laugh for some reason and Miss Gordon just gave me the evil stare. Later we did some simple Maths. Our teachers told us to grab a textbook that suited our math stages, I was a stage 7 and I went to grab a book. The whiteboard said that we had to turn to page 52 on our Maths Books. On page 52 everything was a piece of cake. Like an example is… order 100, 350, 435, 120 from smallest to biggest, and I had most things done in no time.

When Maths was done we still had to do; Dictation, Adjectives from a textbook, Dictionary Skills (Writing out the dictionary), Chanting, and Handwriting.

It seemed like that would take for hours, and that meant we had more WORK not learning to do.

Finally it was morning tea, Mr Robertson told us to get one thing out of our lunchbox and when we were about to eat he said “ BITE” …. “CHEW!” I was so hungry afterwards. When we got TOLD what to play and who with. It was horrible, and our group had to do air netball, which is when you pretend to play netball (without a netball).

After the bell rang the teachers transformed back into their normal self, I actually thought our teachers had hit their heads on a rock or something! The teachers told us that the traditional teaching style was to help us develop our understanding of Student Agency and managing our own learning, not someone else telling us what to do. Thank goodness we don't learn like that anymore!

Ruby Red Emotional Hook

Welcome back to Term 2! We hope you had an a great holiday. 

This Term our big idea is performance. We headed straight the the auditorium and did a fun drama warm up. It's kind of like paper scissors rock, but there are three character actions (we used a Wizard, Elf and Giant). You stand back to back with a buddy and on the count of three turn around to face each other as one of the characters. If you are matching you stay standing, and if not you sit down. As you can imagine with the whole syndicate (200 kids) it was very funny!

Then we had the amazing performance of 'Ruby Red' by our syndicate teachers.  None of them knew the story (except Miss G) so they came on and acted as a character as the story was narrated. They definitely took a responsible risk and found humour and delivered an amazing performance. 

Then it was over to some children from each class to be the characters as we chose the other path of the story. Our very own Terado ended up being 'Locky' and he did a great job - especially his slow motion running!

This is the pick a path story for you to read. Make sure you click on the arrows and bubbles on the slide deck rather than the little slide arrows on the bottom left.

Next we did a performance challenge in different groups. One of the activities was to create a Freeze Frame from a moment in a Fairy Tale. Can you guess what is happening in each of these?

Term 2 Integration: Knowledge co-construction

Created with Padlet

Write down your groups number one piece of knowledge that we will need to be able to put on a successful performance.