Presenting at the Manaiakalani Wananga.

Today was the Manaiakalani Wananga where all of the principles get together. As part of that, the Manaiakalani CoL was introduced and 6 teachers, one from each of the Achievement Challenges, presented for 5 minutes each about their inquiries for the year.
I was chosen to present my inquiry for Achievement Challenge 1, and I also took my presentation board which contains the slides.

Planning for Literacy in Jump Start

I am wanting to build a lot more literacy specific activities into my course / lesson planning. It has become apparent this year that this is where a major failing is within the course so I want to address this right from the start. With this in mind, my planning for the Jump Start at the end of this year for the Year 10 going into NCEA Level 1 has included very specific activities to hopefully help the students analyse and understand the information they are going to be collecting about the work of a chosen architect.

I started my planning on a Google Doc where I could see the overview of what I was trying to do.
Then I transferred all of the resources and planning onto the class site that I am making especially for this class next year. All of this planning in under the Literacy drop down.
I am hoping to build further activities here so that this type of work becomes the normal way we work and hopefully improves the students subject specific literacy skills over time. In this way, we can move the achievement up to merit and excellence.

Term 4 - Jump Start

4 Class OnAir Lessons - Focus on Literacy and Vocabulary

Topic	Activity	Link to work
Film Poster Analysis	Students work in pairs to analyse movie posters with 10 design related words. They then find the definitions of these words. Present this work on the classroom walls for them to refer to easily.	Movie Posters
Reading Exercise	Students read the example description of the Chrysler Building and highlight the SOLO related words in yellow, green and blue. They then take the words that they do not know and add them to a shared Answer Garden.	Chrysler Building
Difficult words from previous exercise	Students to work in pairs and choose 2 words from the answer garden (previous activity) Use Dictionary.com to find the meanings - the exercise will be about reading the different meanings available on Dictionary.com and making an informed decision about what they are going decide is the one they need to use. Put findings on a shared area and decide as a class if the decisions are correct / make sense.	Difficult Word Choice
Design Word / Vocab illustration	Take short list of some basic design words / vocab and find illustrations / images that will help explain what they mean. Make a display on the classroom wall of these word illustrations to refer to.

Lesson Preparation using the New Google Sites

I have made a start on my planning for Jump Start and next year, so I decided to bite the bullet and use the new Google Sites to do it.

I have decided to do a seperate site for each Year group then link them all together using a hub page site.
The one I have been working on the most to start with is the NCEA Level 1 site as this will be needed for Jump Start in week 5.

I have only got one project on here at the moment, the Architect Poster project, and areas for skills and literacy. If you look at this as i write this post, there are gaps as it definitely a work in progress.
Link to site

There are drop downs under each label, so lot of information is included on the site.
Under the home page is the Level 1 calendar and the standards that are on offer over the year.

Under the project tab, there are all the activities listed that the students have to complete for that project. Each activity has it's own page.

Under the skills tab, there are some skills that will be needed for this project. This will be added to over the year as the skills that they need increase.

Under the Literacy tab at the moment, are the activities that we are going to do over the Jump Start period of time at the end of the year. This area will be added to as well as the students need more literacy skills over the course.

Please take a look and any feedback on layout, design or content will be greatly appreciated.

Warm Up Activity for Jump Start

Our Year 10 students start their Jump Start courses in week 5. This gives them a chance to start their NCEA Level 1 courses for 4 weeks before next year.
I am going to do the following warm up activity with my class when I get them.
It is based loosely on Pictionary, where the students work in pairs and get a photograph of an object that they then have to describe to their partner without using the name of the actual object. Their partner has to guess what they are trying to describe. Once they have guessed correctly, they can move on to the next image.
There is two rounds of this so they can swap and both have a go.

What I like about this is the fact that the students are describing products / objects and using verbal literacy and thinking skills without knowing that we are focusing on this.

Link for Round 1

Link for Round 2