Melville Intermediate - NZAIMS Games Starts Today!

From today until Friday Melville Intermediate are one of 193 Schools competing in the NZAIMS Games in Tauranga.    The New Zealand Association of Intermediate and Middle Schools Games is the elite sport competition for Y7/8 students in New Zealand, which Melville Intermediate has competed in for the last five years in Girls Basketball.  We are one of 18 teams in this years competition while the games themselves not only have teams from New Zealand but Australia, including the Knox School from Melbourne who MIS defeated in the 3rd/4th play off last year, and the Cook Islands (in Netball). 

Mr Webb is the manager of the Melville Intermediate School Girls team and will be onsite in Tauranga for the week of competition, we will have a limited posting schedule on this site during this time (although we are going to try and update live from the tournament and post the results online here).  We will be returning to our regular posting schedule from next week and we will be replying and making connections again.

Melville Intrermediate - Special Assembly Performances

These two videos are the other two acts from Melville Intermediates School Assembly on Friday 13th September.  The acts are performin next week locally.  This video is Trinity from Room One who is performing 'Titanium by David Guetta'.  She is assisted by Raven.
Trinity @ Assembly 13/9/13 from myles webb on Vimeo.
The other act that was making their performance public was Kayla from Room Tweleve.
Kyla Ave Maria @ Assembly 13/9/13 from myles webb on Vimeo.

Melville Intermediate - Makere, Trinity and Raven @ Assebly 13/9/13

This coming Thursday students from Melville Intermediate School will be performing at a local Hamilton Cafe, Fresca to entertain the customers.  As a warm up to the performance the acts that are going to be performing to the public gave a special display at Assembly.  This was recorded by Kayla from Room Five and is Makere, Raven and Trinity preforming 'I don't wanna (talk about it)'.  Recorded on Friday 13th September 2013.
Makere, Raven and Trinity @ Assembly 13/9/13 from myles webb on Vimeo.

Melville Intermediate - Ski Trip 2013

Ski Trip 2013 - slideshows

Melville Intermediate - School Ski Trip 2013

This week nine students from Room Five, Melville Intermediate were lucky enough to participate in the School Ski Trip to the snow.  This is a recount written by Chloe from Room Five, about day one.

On Sunday we got to the school and there was one person there.   Then I got there and after about everyone started to get there.  Nearly everybody was there.  Mr Keegan told us to be at school at 1:30pm and he was seven minutes late.   We went into his room and he called out everyones name and everyone was there so we loaded up in our cars and said goodbye to everyone and off we went.

We stated to listen to some songs.  I was in Bianca's car her car was cool.  We went to sleep (not the driver) casuse we were in the car for three hours.  We woke up and were there "yaaa".  Everyone saw a little bit of snow and some people started to have a snowball fight.  Then we had to get our stuff and carry it up a big hill wil lots of rocks.   Everyone was like "are you for real?" and Mr Keegan was like yup and we were like owwwwww.  So we all hardened up and we carried it up.  It was so hard we got in and we unpacked and we were called for dinner.  We went up the steps and Mr Keegan have some instructions and then we had dinner.  It was butter chicken. Then when we were finished w
e had to go back to our rooms and we chilled out there for a while.  About ten minutes later we went and had pudding.   We had Ice Cream, Fruit Salad and Chocolate Moose.   We all had tweny minutes until bed time so we had a few games and then it was time to go to bed.

Melville Intermediate - Girls Basketball heading to NZAIMS 2013

Our Girls Basketball team is heading to Tauranga for the NZAIMS Games starting this Sunday.  We've spent the year preparing for the tournament playing on Tuesday nights at the YMCA on Pembrooke Street in Hamilton.  Our Girls team has gone on a thirteen game undefeated streak during term one and two, to playing games in the 'B' pool against Boys teams and Club teams.  Our final game on Tuesday took place against Flyers Lakers.   Earlier this term we'd been defeated 22-25 in a close tight encounter.   In this game Melville were able to dominate from the outset, taking a 25-6 half time lead, before winning 39-23.  Filmed by Maia and the bench.
Vs. Flyers Lakers 9/9/13 from myles webb on Vimeo.

Melville Intermediate - Is THIS Room 15 @ Tawa Intermediate School?

As part of Geometry for Mathematics we are attempting to create scale maps of classrooms, we have already created maps of own classroom and Selwyn House School from Christchurch.  Both these experiences provided us with better questioning and reasoning.  However our newest challenge has really tested our students - a map of Room Fifteen at Tawa Intermediate School.   They've got some unusual learning stations and classroom set up (no teachers desk for instance!).  We orginally had a detailed description of the classroom provided by one of the students, Tom.  We then reworked that description with additional information provided in the form of questions asked through the Room Fifteen class page.  Today each Mathematical group in Room Five presented their version of Tawa Intermediate School - and as you can see from the videom, four different groups would appear to mean four different maps!
Is this Tawa Intermediate School? from myles webb on Vimeo.

Melville Intermediate - Tawa Intermediate: Mapping in 2d and Minecraft

At present we're engaging with the students from Room Fifteen Tawa Intermediate.  In the past two weeks we've completed a virtual model of Selwyn House, Christchurch.  We followed the same proces that were undertaking with Tawa Intermediate.   

We left comments to start with on the class or students blogs that we are engaging with.  We hoped that by leaving these comments we could construct a two dimensional grid model of the classroom.  The original inspiration for the task was 'Room with a View' from the Mathematics Geometry Figure it Out Books.   What we discovered from the task is that we really need to work on our questioning.  Sometimes we are asking questions that need to be clarified or more precise.  Sometimes we were asking questions but weren't clear enough about the information that we were looking to gain.

Based on the students responses we created a two dimesional grid map.  We then created a three dimensional version using uni-block cubes.   We then posted this online so our Aotearoa Quadblogging buddies could leave us feedback and we could modify the design if required.

We then converted this block map to a three dimesional model.  Finally we used Minecraft to build the classroom.  

With Tawa Intermediate we have discovered some challenging ideas - not every student has a desk, this is a new concept for the students to get their heads around.  We were also floored to hear that the teacher does not have a desk! In Room Five, Melville Intermediate we've got desk top computers - not so at Tawa Intermediate who have laptops and portable devices.  They've also got a wall dividing the classroom in two.  

Its been a brillant experience for the students of Melville Intermediate and its only just begun.  You can see some of the work in our modelling books here.

Tawa Intermediate - slideshows

Melville Intermediate - Groups of Five

GroupsofFive2013 - slideshows

Melville Intermediate - A Week until the NZAIMS Games!

Melville Intermediate is competing in the NZAIMS again this year, for the fifth consecutive year in Girls Basketball.   The tournament which starts in Tauranga next Sunday with whats sure to be a fantastic opening ceremony is the biggest students sporting tournament in New Zealand.  There are 193 schools competing this year!

Melville Intermediate School have a particularly proud tradition in this competition - winning the Girls competition in 2009 and making the semi-finals every year since finishing third in 2011 and 2012.   Currently we are the only school to have achieved this feat.

The team (and Mr Webb) will be onsite at the tournament for all of the week from Sunday 15th September to Friday 20th September, Mr Webb as manager of the Melville Intermediate School team.

We have confirmed games against Aquinas College, Dio College (Auckland), Kristin School (Auckland) on Monday 16th, St Cuthberts College (Auckland) Tauranga Intermediate, Northcross Intermediate (Auckland) on Tuesday 17th and Kura O Te Koutu (Rotorua) on Wednesday 18th. 

This site will still be posting for that week and as much as possible we will be updating the games as the results come to hand.  If you are present at the venue and would like to say hello, please do so, all games are at the TECT Arena at Baypark Stadium.

Melville Intermediate - Cross Country Highlights

Today Melville Intermediate held their 2013 Cross Country race at school.  Both year groups competed in Boys/Girls races looking to win house points for our team competition.   The races were held at 9:00am and 10:00am and Room Five had the first highlights online by 11:00am.  This video was recorded by a number of Room Five students on Thursday 5th September 2013.  Edited by Bianca and Kristal from Room Five.
CrossCountry2013 from myles webb on Vimeo.

This is Harry from Room Five's recount about the School Cross Country.
It was the day of the Cross Country.  My legs were shaking like a dogs tail.   Mr Keegan blew the horn.  "Hang on, hang on - that was just a test".  "What?" I said.  Then the horn went for real everybody was pushing and nudging.  Someone pushed me over.  I got up and kept running then a few seconds later I stood on a giant thistle! Ouch! I stood in a spot picking the thistles out of my foot but I kept on running.    Suddendly I was approaching the giant Melville High School field, it was huge! As I was starting to get to the end I spewed in the bush but then I kept on running the last straight.  "Yus!" I said but someone was behind me so I sprinted my legs off then I crossed the finish line.   All the girls were squealing like babies, Katipa wrote my group down.   I was dissapointed in myself but after all that had happened I still finished the race.

Melville Intermediate - Cross Country 2013

This morning the Melville Intermediate School Cross Country was run between 9:00am and 10:00am.  The entire school took place in racing in Y7 and Y8 Boys and Girls.  This slideshow is from the event and more details will follow.

Cross Country 2013 - slideshow

Melville Intermediate - Art Technology 2013

In Art for Technology we are doing 'Fantastic Creatures'.   First before we did anything we had to draw a part mural from 'Where the Wild Things Are'.   Once we had done that we had to make and design out own creature that was 'Fantastic' and they had to made from recycling materials mainly bottles.   An example is that some people have made some dinosaurs and I have made a sea monster.  We had to paper mache them once we had the design so that the model was strong.   The photographs that we took from Art Tech are by Owen and Josh and show the design process.

Art Tech 2013 - slideshows

Melville Intermediate - Tesselations @ MIS

We've currently looking at Geometry for Mathematics.  One of the topics that our group the Lumpy Space Princesses took a digital camera around the Melville Intermediate School grounds looking for evidence of Tesselations.  They then took photographs of what they thought were tesselations, do you agree? What makes a pattern a tesselation?
Tesselations @ MIS on PhotoPeach

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: