Melville Intermediate - Thank you from the New Town 2nd Grade Superstars

Recently we've loved seeing the series of videos about research about New Zealand from the New Town 2nd Grade Superstars in the USA.  We've made an effort to connect with their class and provide feedback with thier New Zealand learning.  We were lucky enough to discover this Thank You video that they posted on their class page to our students.
thankyouroom5 from New Town on Vimeo.
You can click on the link here to their wonderful page.

Melville Intermediate - 8C Selwyn House in Minecraft

We've been working on our Selywn House School models for the past week and a half in Mathematics for Geometry.   Those of you who've been following us with the series of posts will know that we originally used the Figure It Out Books 'Room with a View' as our inspiration for this activity.  We modified it slightly - we used blogging comments to start constructing our maps and when we didn't get enough information we went back and left follow up comments.  The allowed us to create our two dimensional models.  We then used this to create our block models of 8C Selwyn House, we then collaborated with them and modified our designs.  The final stage in this process, from two dimensional model to three dimensional model was for our students to use Minecraft to create a three dimensional model of the classroom.   This is Elizabeths model of the inside of Selwyn House, Christchurch.


This is what Elizabeth wrote about the task:

For Maths, Mr Webb asked us to choose a class, ask them some questions that would get us information about what there class looks like, and draw out our version of what we think the class looks like from the information that we got back from them. I chose 8c Selwyn House and asked them about 32 questions. I wanted to get as much information as I could so I could get the classroom exactly right. I ended up getting it wrong but I don’t mind because it was really fun to draw the classroom and create it on Minecraft. Here are my screenshots:

Melville Intermediate - What does Selwyn House look like?

 This morning in our class we have been designing 2-D models of 8cs class but we have come across a problem, Lots of us have asked the same questions but we have all been getting different answers so we have no idea at all what theyre classroom loos like. could you please all decide on a set of answers so we can design your classroom.

- How many doors are in the classroom? - some of the students say that there are two doors in the classroom and some have said that there are three.  Elizabeth from Room Five thinks that this is because one of the doors is a double door and the other door is a fire door.  

- How many windows are there in Selwyn House in 8c?  We had two different answers from the students.  Some of the students said that there was seventeen windows and others said that there were nine windows.  We thought that this could have been because some of the windows were double windows.

- Are the desks set out around the teachers desk or in a cluster of four desks? We thought that we were told that all of the desks were in a circle around the teachers desk in the middle and others thought that the desks were in the top left hand corner of the class, in a group.

- Where is the coffee table and the couches in the classroom? We think that they are located in the bottom right hand corner of the classroom (the South East corner) because that's the only space in the classroom that we couldnt allocate.  The middle picture in this series is Elizabeth and Jamie working on a two dimensional map of what they think Selwyn House in Christchurch is like!

Melville Intermediate - visits Maeroa Intermediate Room Nine

Maeroa Intermediate Room Nine is a class page that has been started by the students and the teachers just this year.  It's got a variety of material online and Maeroa Intermediate is a similar school to Melville Intermediatte in Hamilton.

Students of Room Five your task is to visit the Maeroa Intermediate Room Nine class page.  You need to select one piece of work or material that has been posted online and leave a comment about it.  Remember the success criteria that we have set for your commenting on other students work.  Ensure that you leave our URL in return.

This is a video of our Girls Rugby team playing Maeroa Intermediate in the Inter Intermediate Girls Rugby Competition last year at Memorial Park, Cambridge.  Maeroa are in the blue and red and Melville Intermediate are in the green with red trim.

This is what was written about last years game

This is the second to last video from our 2012 Girls Rugby Tournament.  It's highlights from our fourth pool game, against Maeroa Intermediate.  Melville were on a roll at this point having won three games in a row, one more would equal the total number of wins from last year.  Standing in Melville's way was a very dangerous Maeroa Intermediate School, who scored an extremely good try early into the match and managed to convert it to take an early lead.   Melville however by this point we really gelling well as a team including showing some strong defence, wait until you see Veronica's ankle tap just after the Maeroa try! Filmed by Veronica from Room Five at Memorial Park, Cambridge on Tuesday 8th May 2012.




We also have played Maeroa Intermediate in a variety of this year (Touch) and last year (Touch, Rugby, Netball, Basketball, Volleyball to name but a few!) Our 2012 Girls team had to play Maeroa Intermediate at Basketball and this is the highlights from a game that took place on Tuesday 7th March 2012 with Melville winning 49-5, for this game Melville are in the Green/Red and Maeroa are in the blue.

Melville Intermediate - Weather Reports for Techie Kids

On Friday we were looking at the Techie Kids page from the USA and were reading about their snow and their weather conditions.  We had two groups from Room Five working on videos to help the Techie Kids to understand what the weather is like here in Hamilton.    Manish, Owen and Nathan H created this Snow Report for The Techie Kids! Its got one important piece of information in it, we have had snow in Hamilton twice, twice in the last one hundred years, which included a ten second snow flurry last year.  Also we asked our class how many students had seen snow and the answer was about half (13 out of about 26).  This video below is the Boys creation:
Techie Kids Weather - Snow Manish from myles webb on Vimeo.
We also had a group of Elizabeth, Bianca and Jamie researching the weather forecast for the week ahead. One of the things that we needed to do for the Techie Kids was to convert our temperatures from centigrade into farhenheit which the girls did by using an online converter.  If you have a look at the video you will see its a fairly similar forecase for the next week:
TechieKidsWeather Jamie from myles webb on Vimeo.
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Melville Intermediate - Tuesdays Narrative Writing

Today in class we are continuing to look at students narrative writing from around the world as examples to get us focussed for our last unit of writing this year. Yesterday we were looking at Emily's work in the UK. Today we are looking at the work of Sam's brother from Dunedin. Sam is a student in Dunedin at St Clairs School, in Room Nine. The original post of Sams is here, and her brothers original post is here. 

Students of Melville Intermediate have to read the narrative, create a new title for the story based on the writing, continue the story for an additional paragraph and then ask the author three questions about their narrative. The questions need to be posted in the form of comments on Sams blog or her brothers original post.