Melville Intermediate - Term 1, 2010

The school term in New Zealand starts this week as we have now finished the Summer Holidays. Students at Melville Intermediate that are in our Y7 syndicate, including obviously the new Room 8, will be at school for their first day on Wednesday 3rd February. The Y8 students of Melville Intermediate School will be present from Thursday 4th February, that includes the students who made up last year's Room 8 classroom. We also will have a new Y7 Syndicate Site for publishing work set up for this year, although this class blog will be continuing as normal.

As part of the introduction to 2010 we will be viewing many blogs and sites this week and hoping to reconnect with many of our friends from 2009. (Some schools in New Zealand are starting on Tuesday 2nd February but for Melville Intermediate School this is a teacher only day). We look forward to hearing from you all soon!
Mr Webb and Room 8, 2010, Melville Intermediate School.

Melville Intermediate - Four Days to Go!

Melville Intermediate - Go Check these wonderful blogs out

At the moment, although its the school holidays all the teachers are working hard at preparing for the start to the 2010 school year. One of the pleasing aspects of the holidays is that it allows ourselves to look online at what other students and teachers from around the world are doing. Three sites that I visited from the last few days I have really enjoyed. The first is a blog in the UK - North Nottinghamshire called "PreistSic5" a class of 9 and 10 year old students, they have just started putting up some clever posts one of which asked people to put pictures of their classroom up (hence the slide show). Their blog is really got some good ideas on it!

Secondly I found a blog in Africa, in Tanzania the International School of Tanganyika's Grade Two site, the work that is going online from there is truly superb, a real great quality to it and a wonderful site. Wonderful to have a chance for your students to travel to Africa too!

Finally I also found Miss Noshie's Classroom site from Beirut, Lebanon. Again a wonderful opportunity for your students to go somewhere different and to experience students living in a different environment, I didn't know for instance that it snowed in Beirut in Winter!

Melville Intermediate - Learning Maori Online in 2010

Thanks to all of you who have so far responded and are interested in having our students teach some Maori language to your students and your classroom in the coming weeks!

We're currently sorting through everything and should have all the information organized, sorted and posted shortly. We'd love others to be involved around the world in this, if you are interested we'd like to Skype with your classroom from a class in New Zealand and teach you some basic phrases/introductions in the Maori Language. It won't just be Room 8 but also some of the other classrooms from Melville Intermediate School! Should imagine that most of this would be completed with a single Skype Session so if you are interested and haven't already put your name down, please leave a comment on this post!

I am sure the students from Room 8 will be extremely excited to be doing this when they come back to school, as will the students from other classrooms at Melville Intermediate School. I think that it will be an exciting way to introduce a lot of students to online collaboration this year. In the mean time while you are waiting you can have a look at a few things related to Maori Language from last years Room 8 @ Melville Intermediate School class! This is our schools fabulous CPA - Cultural Performing Arts Group, performing a Maori Poi Dance during one of last years concerts night from our School Hall.



For preparation to learn a Mihi have a look at our first posts of 2009 they include the format for the Mihi (Greeting) that Room 8 will be teaching and also a couple of slideshows that the students created last year to help with the learning of them. You can also view this link to Mr Lamsheds Class in Adelaide, Australia, of their students learning last year (remember New Zealand and Australaia are seperate countries!)

You can view some of the Maori Language Videos that were created by Room 8 last year including how to count to 100 in Maori by Arahia. You can also take a trip down memory lane and view material that was created in 2008 by Mr Webb's old classroom before he came to Melville Intermediate, in these lessons the students spoke some Maori Language. Finally you can also click on this link to view a link to Appleby School in Nelson where we had a link for their class to learn a Mihi, their fabulous teacher Allanh K also recorded some of the teaching that we did with her class for their Mihi (although it has a seperate format for what we will be teaching, slightly) and you can view this video by clicking here! We also had the prviledge of conecting and collaborating with our students sharing their culture with other students around the world last year. In probably Mr Webbs favourite video of the year two of our Room 8 students, Destin and Cleveland viewed material on Mr Lamsheds Class of their Haka. The Boys wanted to help them and scripted and produced this video (with help from Tavita a teacher aide at school), it still sends shivers down my spine watching it. Enjoy.

Mr Webb on behalf of Room 8, Melville Intermediate School, Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand.

Melville Intermediate - Year in Review 2009

In two weeks our 2010 School year begins in New Zealand. We're currently busy behind the scenes putting together our 2010 work and I am sure that there are very excited students all throughout the country looking forward to starting back at school the week after next! We're going to take this opportunity to have a look at some of the highlights and the work that evolved from our 2009 class site.

We started on the first of February with taking shots of everyone from the classroom. Unfortunately Bubbleshare which we used to display the pictures has now closed! Our first posted work for 2009 which you can view is our 2009 Mihi Slideshows. Our first task back will be learning our Mihi (Maori Greetings) and as our learning activity for these our goal is to teacher another class around the world. In March we had the Rugby League World Cup Trophy visit our school (New Zealand are the World Champions)... we feature our wonderful school gardens for the first time on this site by conducting tours around them so people around the world could see them... we also demonstrated our worm farms and how they worked... taking part for the first time in the Edubloggers Class Blogging Challenge was a rewarding experience... We had our day Camp to Camp Ruatuna, unfortunately we couldn't all go to that, but we were able to take a video camera with us and film some of the activities like the stretcher making and sausage making... April saw a host of activities our Wearable Arts Entries, the School Touch Competitions... Waka Ama... May saw the arrival of a special package sent for us all the way from Texas of some 'Peeps' for some students this was recalled as the highlight of the entire year! We were helping Hackham East School with their Haka... June saw the debut of our Hip Hop school group online and our Maori counting videos...July saw the CPA group performing on Saturday at the local markets and of course we were there to film it for everyone else to see... it was Maori Language week at School and our "Soccer Skills" videos had already made it up to episode six... August saw our work relating to the Waikato River being published, more CPA and Hip Hop performances... Septemeber saw the Y8 Prep Economic Day, while Mr Webb was manager of the Girls Basketball team who won the National Finals at the 2009 AIMS Games... Melville's got talent also took place this month, and again if you couldn't be there you just needed to visit our blog to see the highlights...October saw the CPA performances during the week in the evening, and in possibly the most classiest movie of the year, Bailey, Arahia and Mr Webb starred in our entry to the Tamaki Film Festival, Bailey and the Magic Cowbell' November saw the Y7 Big Day out and our School and Inter-Intermediate Athletics Days... December saw the culmination of the year with the Y8 Ball, Prizegiving and suddenly 2009 was no more!!!

Melville Intermediate - Normal Service to Resume Shortly

Thanks for your visit to this site, as you will be aware students in New Zeland are currently on their Summer Holidays as the School year for 2009 ended in December. The new school year starts this February (Melville Intermediate Y7 students will be present at School on Tuesday 2nd February, Y8 students, including the 2009 R8 class will be there the following day.

Mr Webb's home computer is currently being repaired (yes thats right now approaching its third week!) so that's the reason for the change in this site and the absence of the rest of the material from 2009. Never fear, we are expecting it back at any time in the next week or so when we will complete all the relevant posting from last year.

In the mean time thanks so much for your visit/comments and we look forward to networking/being in contact with you shortly.

Melville Intermediate - Online Collaboration Speaking Maori

Our students who will be at school again shortly (in three weeks) to begin the year have a task relating to the learning of their Mihi (greeting) in Maori. Once the students have learned this greeting we'd like to give them the opportunity to teach a Mihi to another classroom. This year at Melville Intermediate all of our Y7 Classrooms will be doing this online, so we'd like to get at least five classrooms that are interested. Room 8 did this last year with Allanhk's Class at Appleby School near Nelson, in the South Island of New Zealand and it was one of the highlights of the year (view it here!)! If your class would be interested you can leave a comment to this post and we'll get you sorted from Mr Webb.

Melville Intermediate - Negative 47 Degrees Centigrade

One of my favorite Blogs at the moment, that I really enjoyed visiting last year, and sure that I will enjoy visiting this year comes from Russia. and is Lyumila's While we in New Zealand have our School Holidays for Summer at the moment and temperature in the mid to high 20s (degrees centigrade) in Russia, Krasnoyarskiykray at the moment its forecast this week to be negative 47 degrees! As a teacher who has only ever seen snow once (and then it wasn't much more than mush!) this is really unbelieveable. Mr McClung the teacher in charge of Mr McClungs World (one of the classes we were skyping with at the end of Term Four) was also telling me today that its negative 17 degrees in their part of the world this week! Anyway make sure you visit both of their blogs if you have not already. They have something really wonderful to offer.

Melville Intermediate - Welcome you to 2010

Thank you for your visit. Students in New Zealand are currently on their Christmas/Summer Holidays and will be returning to school in the first week of February 2010. We will be retaining this site for 2010, with the same address but the class will not be posting until then.

In the meantime we will be posting the previously unpublished work and shows from 2009 once Mr Webb (Room 8 Classroom Teacher) Computer is fully repaired, which should be sometime later this week.