Melville Intermediate Vs. Irn Bru

This afternoon in class Mr Webb posed a challenge to the students of Room Five - we are looking at cultural diversity and have made a great connection with Scotland, but we needed something more.  Not far from our school is a shop called 'Celtic Connections' where they sell a range of all things Scottish, so Mr Webb went there at our schools lunch break to track something special down for the class.

They did have haggis but they also had Irn-Bru  Mr Webb purchased some for the classroom.  We examined it in class, reading the label and looking at the information about it.  We then looked online about Irn-Bru and found out that it was the number one soft drink in Scotland and that in Scotland it is more popular than Coke or Pepsi.

As a class we made predictions about what we thought that it would taste like based on the ingredients and what it said on the label.  We compared it to drinks that we knew about other similar drinks that we have in New Zealand.

Then it was time for the taste test.  Each student had their own cup, was given an amount of Irn-Bru to try if they wanted too.  Everyone in the classroom of 26 opted to try some Irn-Bru.  We then had a round of Irn-Bru trivia with the answers contained in the videos that were posted to us by Lochardil Primary School Class P6/7. 
 
  R5VsIRNBru 2013 from myles webb on Vimeo.

Melville Intermediate - Video Collaboration with LochardilPrimary

Mr Webb wasn't at school on Friday, he was with the Melville Intermediate Girls Basketball team competing in the Kaitoa Middle School Basketball Tournament at the Sports Dome in Rotorua.  When the team returned Mr Webb found a stunning link through our class page! Our new friends from P6/7 Lochardil Primary School  from Iverness in Scotland have already replied to Jamie from Room Five questions with some wonderful comments.  Elizabeth left a further set of questions and Lochardil P6/7 have responded with a wonderful video answering our questions.  You can view their class page here.


Our orginal collaboration started with Jamie who located their class page with a google search - Jamie from Room Five left Lochardil Primary School their first every International comment, even though they'd had over 20,000 visitors! They responded to Jamies questions with some exceptional answers, and then asked us a set of questions so we in turn answered some of thier questions by
creating this video. P6/7 Lochardil Primary then responded to Elizabeth from Room Fives questions by creating the video at the start of this post.

On behalf of Melville Intermediate School I would like to thank all the students and staff of P6/7 Lochardil Primary School for their fantastic collaboration, we've done some in the past but the students of Room Five (and Melville Intermediate) are going to be so excited when they see this on Monday morning in class. Thank you.

Melville Intermediate - Questions and Answers for Scotland

Those of you who are regular followers of our class page will know about the recent collaboration with students from Lochardil Primary School in Iverness, Scotland.  Jamie is researching Scottish culture for her cultural diversity work that we are doing next term.   P6/7 replied to us and replied in depth, and then they posted on their wonderful class page a series of questions for us to answer about New Zealand for them.   Their questions were:

What is your national anthem?
What are your traditional foods?
What is the weather like where you live?
What is the story behind your flag?
What time do you start and finish school?
What religions do people follow?
How big is your town?
What’s homework like in your school?
What’s the national plant?
What music do you listen to?
Do you have any traditional dances?
What sports do you do?
What languages do you speak?
Is your town, Hamilton, named after the town Hamilton in Scotland?
Has anyone in your class been to Scotland?

Well today in class Jamie, along with assistance from Kristal and Elizabeth sought some answers to these question from our new friends in Scotland.  We talked about an interested way to respond and it was decided to go class to class at Melville Intermeidate and ask different students from different classes (and one deputy principal, thank you Mrs Patterson!) to answer the questions.  This video was shot on Friday 25th May 2013.

QuestionsforScotland from myles webb on Vimeo.

Melville Intermediate - Jamie (and Melville) Famous in Scotland!

We've just started our work on Cultural Diversity which is our unit of work for this term.  Each of our students is researching a culture and as part of that culture is going to condcut an interview with someone from a different culture.  Jamie from Room Five is looking at Celtic/Scottish culture.  Earlier this week Jamie used google to locate some class pages from Scotland and left a comment asking for some assistance with her research questions.  The original post with the questions is here.  Its fair to say that she has been thrilled by the response and as a class we are very excited.  Jamie has recieved some wonderful feedback and we've discovered and made some wonderful connections with classes and students around the world. 

We'd like to thank everyone that has responded already to Jamie and in particular we'd like to thank the staff and pupils from P6/7 Lochardil Primary School in Scotland for their simply awesome response to Jamies Questions, which you can read by clicking here.