Key Competencies

I like the New Zealand Curriculum. I get excited by things like the Vision and Values in it. I think its awesome that we are encouraged - expected, even - to explicitly teach about citizenship, to integrate creativity, and to develop curiousity.

Anyway, one of the big pushes in our school right now is to make the way that we teach the Key Competencies more explicit in our classrooms. I think this is a great idea, so long as it can be done relatively painlessly. Fortunately, this is possible. I used the activity below with my Y10 students yesterday:

Key Competencies Self Evaluation

I just wrote this on the board, and typed it up this morning so it could be shared. Some students found the matching difficult, and I worked with them to remind them/build with them a definition of what each KC actually is. Some students flew through it, and were coming to me with their statements and wanting to know what to do if they thought they did the KC twice. I haven't had a good look at what anyone wrote yet, but I will do that soon and give some feedback and feedforward. Overall, though, it was a simple activity that students got into far more than I expected. I guess all my excitement was infectious for some people.

I'm kind of embarrassed for them

I don't think my students quite understood what I meant when I said, "I will scan the pages that you make into a pdf and upload it to a sharing site so that you - and others - can access it." Personally, I think that is clear and unambiguous. My students did not quite get it, which, I think, explains why their pages look like something escaped from their pens and died on the paper. Well, perhaps that's a little harsh. Most of them are legible.

Optics Visual Dictionary

This was my first attempt at making an online visual dictionary with my Level 2 Physics class. They chose a word from a list I generated; in a perfect world, they would generate their own list from a pre-reading activity. Allowing the students to choose their own words worked well. Some students tried to pick a word they thought would be easy, but they turned out to be deceptively difficult. You should have seen the student who picked 'upright' as his word; it was a vexing task for him.

The biggest problem with this, I think, was that the students just didn't realise that when I said that I would upload it, that meant that I would be sharing it with other people. I trust that next time will look a lot more organised.

Adjectives, or the most sumptuous and delectable post ever

My daughter, aged six, has an inordinate love for adjectives. I approve. Her favourite adjectives right now are 'adorable' (applied to babies, mostly) and 'sumptuous'. The last one has me a little confused, as I generally use 'delectable' and 'toothsome' for food I like. I think she picked it up at school.

Some of my time at school is spent on adjectives. Just this week, I made the first part of a visual dictionary of optics with my Level 2 Physics class. It contains adjectives such as 'real', 'virtual', 'upright' and 'inverted'. You have no idea how much trouble a simple concept like 'upright' caused. The finished product does not contain the word 'erect', but only because I was particularly vigilant. I now just have to check the rest of the entries and scan them - I wanted to use the computers, but they were all booked. How irritating.

A lot of the explicit vocabulary work I have been doing lately with the Level 1 Science and Y10 Science classes, however, has been concerned with verbs. I have been using a lot of starters that focus on learning outcomes and learning verbs. At Level 1, some of this has been associated with the learning outcomes for the standards on which the students are working (even though we teach according to the curriculum, the students still need to understand the achivement standard specifications from the NZQA). At Y10, a lot of it has been to do with students understanding - and, hopefully, making their own - learning outcomes.

SLO Wordle Activity

Above is the Level 1 document. The number of students who weren't quite sure what verbs were was not quite a huge as I had anticipated. This was encouraging.

Plastics Learning Outcomes Starter Activity

This Y10 starter activity proved a little more difficult. Not many students spotted that the verb was always the first word in the learning outcome. Fortunately, those that did tended to shout it out at the top of their voices, so everyone soon knew.

I don't, in general, print starter activities like this off. I usually put them on the projector and get students to write down what they think they need. We informally assess it by students getting the whiteboard markers and coming to the board to write their answers up. It works for us.

He whero, he whero, he whero

Matariki is one of my favourite times of the year - in theory, at least. In practice, I dislike getting up when it is still dark and cannot wait for the solstice to pass so I can get some sunlight.

Last year, we planted flax at the school. Sadly, we haven't done any planting this year, but we will be more organised next year. Instead, I have been finding out all sorts of intriguing scientific astronomical things.

I enjoyed this post on sciblogs about the stars that make up the Pleiades. One of the things I like about this post is that the author recognises that mythology is important, and, get this, that retelling myths is not a defeat for scientific fact. It is possible for myths and science to coexist. How revolutionary.

Anyway, I do enjoy the night sky in winter. I love looking up and seeing the Milky Way, though I am terrible at spotting stars in particular. I never have been very good at it, and my general dislike of being cold has always impeded any desire to learn more.

Aside from the sky, I have also been excited by the haka competition at school. I love this competition, and worked really hard on it. The students rocked on the day, especially since we wrote the introduction ourselves and it was a bit nervewracking to perform. The video below shows my house, Inverness. I think the students did a brilliant job:



And, immodestly, something I am particularly proud of were the korowai that the two leaders wore:

We already have a bunch of things that we're going to work on for next year, but, for the moment, I am happy with two korowai, seven sisters, and cold mornings. Happy Matariki, everyone.