“Let’s meet the Aliens!” – a story walk

For our contribution to the Pt England School News on 21 November 2024 we, students from room 15, followed the story walk “Let’s meet the aliens!” by German creator ©unterrichtmitspass.

What exactly is a story walk?

A story walk is a text consisting of sentences or paragraphs that each describe a single image. We read the paragraphs and walked around the classroom to find the corresponding picture.

The example below shows alien #4, which is described in paragraph #5. We then wrote the picture number next to the paragraph. We continued reading until we had found all the aliens. Once we had all the numbers, we could form the solution sentence using the letters next to the numbers. In this case, we found out what the aliens said.

As you can see from the examples above, the story walks are available in several different versions. So there was something for every reader in our class.

Do you want to see our story walk? Watch closely and enjoy! Your students from room 15 & Mrs Lorenz. 

 

Fact or Fiction

In our Cybersmart lesson today, we had to research if the information Mrs Tofa had on the slides were fact or fiction. In our discussion, we learnt that a fact is when information is true and fiction is when information is not true. All of us had to do some research to confirm if the information were facts or fiction.

After we completed Mrs Tofa’s slides, we had to create our own slides with information for our peers to identify as fact or fiction. The topics for our information were different because of our interests. Some of us had information about countries, food, fruit, vegetables and movies. We blogged our slides on our blogs so our peers can go to our blogs and identify if our information is fact or fiction.

Learning about fake news

Today for our Cybersmart lesson with Mrs Tofa, we were learning about fake news. First we discussed what media is because we are learning about Smart Media this term. Media is different ways information or messages is communicated. Our activity for today was to identify what is fake news and what is real news. We used the different ways to identify fake news to find out if the news we had on our slides were real or not.

Here are Selena’s slides from today’s lesson.

How often are we blogging?

Today for our Cybersmart lesson with Mrs Tofa, we had to do a count of how many blog posts we have been posting each month. It was a really interesting activity for us to do. We had to access our blog posts from our blog dashboard and then click on the published blog posts because we did not want to count the drafts too.

Mrs Tofa provided a table with the months from February to September and we had to write down how many blog posts we posted in each month. After we counted, we had to set a goal about how many blog posts we want to post next week which is the last week of term.

Today’s lesson was a good lesson for us to reflect on how many blog posts we are posting each month. We are proud of the blogging we do in our class and we will continue to blog more of our learning.

Here are Layla’s slides from our lesson today

Writing quality blog comments

Today for our Cybersmart lesson, we were learning how to write quality blog comments. Our comments have to be positive, thoughtful and helpful. Mrs Tofa provided a template which helped up compose our quality blog comments.

For our task, we used the template to write quality blog comments to our classmates. After answering every prompt in the template, we were able to see that our comments were quality blog comments.

Here are comments made by Jonah and Connor.

My Dream Google Meet by Serena

Today my dream Google meet is with Simone Biles, Mrs Nelson and Serena Williams. We were going to talk to Mrs Nelson because she left the school. We are also going to talk to Simone Biles because she is a famous gymnast. Then we are going to talk to Serena Williams because she is a famous tennis player and because my name is Serena. I also want to talk about how long you have been in the Olympics.

It’s cool to be kind

Today for our Cybersmart lesson with Mrs Tofa, we learnt about being kind online. We discussed the many ways we can communicate with others online and the importance of being kind in our communication. We also discussed what we should do when we receive negative comments such as telling a teacher or an adult and using our WITS.

For our create, we created some posters to encourage others to be kind. Here are posters created by Serena and Charles.

Creating Matariki stars using Google Drawings

Today for our Cybersmart lesson we created Matariki stars. We first discussed the theme for this year’s Matariki celebration which is Matariki heri kai. Matariki bringer of food. For our create task, we created our stars. We used images, line tools and shapes to create our stars.  We also had to order the appearance of our images either to the back or to the front of our star. It was a fun activity today.

Here are the stars designed by Summer and Jonah

Creating a visual mihi

Today for our Cybersmart lesson with Mrs Tofa, we created out own visual mihi. A visual mihi tells others about you through images. We were encouraged not to use words. We discussed that images we use for our visual mihi have to be cybersmart and promotes us positively.

We used google drawings to create our visual mihi. We also learnt now to change the shape of our images using the mask image tool.

Below is Jonah’s visual mihi