Room 11 has been learning to use different types of sentences in their writing. Varying sentence types are important in writing  to ensure we are working towards level 4. Below is a screenshot of Room 11’s progress on write that essay. As you can see, room 11 has not only the most active students across the school but also the most improved.  Room 11 has learnt how to use simple sentences, adverb start sentences, preposition start sentences and red, white and blue sentences. By applying various sentence types we create an atmosphere for our reader and make them more engaged.

Room 11 has been working on Write that Essay to improve our writing. We are learning to use sentence trains to experiment with different sentence types. In our first lesson we learnt about simple sentences, adverb starts and exploring the subject. There are 12 main sentences types that we will learn to master over the next term. We began with writing reports about ourselves. We tried to write in the third person and focused our paragraphs around different aspects of our lives. Here is some of our writing:

Another day learning with Manaiakalani. Today we learnt about protecting our personal information online and the effects it can have if we do overshare. We enjoyed exploring the Mindful Mountain on Interland. Some of us found the challenges easy, when we were having trouble our friends helped us out. Turns out, we weren’t reading the instructions which made gameplay expectionally difficult.  We completed a jigsaw and a jamboard exploring the postives, negatives and questions we had about sharing our information online.

Yesterday, we decided to test our adaptable digital skills and reinforce what we have learned with Cheryl from Manaiakalani. We were focusing on reading punctuation and grammar accurately. Students used the free website vocaroo to recording themselves reading.

After completing the recording students needed to save and share their audio clip. The downloaded the clip to their files then had to rename and upload the file to their Hapara Literacy folder. We are still working on the latter.

Here is an example of a student’s recording:

Here are some pictures of students finding their own space to record their reading.

Room 11 has been very engaged throughout the animation creation tasks We enjoyed learning to manipulate google draw, then transferring these skills to google slides to create our very own animations.

Many students spent some of their own time (including breaks) to create other animations that told a story or showed their character doing tricks. In the future I think we should try to challenge ourselves by retelling a story we have written in writing and incorporating subtitles so the reader can view and read the story simutaneously.

Check out our animations linked in the google slide below.