Maureen+-+Muritai

Hi my name is Maureen and this week I started my New Entrant class with four lovely children. I teach them on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays and am released on Thursdays and Fridays to do my Deputy Principal responsibilities.

This term I want to train these first four children in a variety of skills including how to open, close and explore each of the aspects of the Kidspix programme so that they can become the 'experts' for the next lot of new five year olds. Later in the year I want them to create a slide show using Kidpix. I also need to teach a variety of activities as I want the one laptop computer in my classroom to be used independently by the children on a daily basis during my literacy and numeracy times. This term I will be making a powerpoint presentation to show at an evening for parents of preschoolers. This year I want to create and continually update a classroom learning log. I want to learn how to place photos on a blog and how to also do podcasts.

24/4 Hi Maureen, You have a lot of great goals for the year! Did you see the matrix of skills to develop in Kidpix on the downloadable resources page? (Point England Junior Strategy) How did your powerpoint presentation go? [|Your blog] is looking great - I see your last post was yesterday! It would be great if you could update your progress here :)

Hi Working with the first four children has been good as my class numbers have doubled to 13 with 6 new entrants who started on Monday. I have introduced some extra visuals to help the children follow the process and next week in our lab session I will get my four 'experts' to show the others. I am looking forward to getting a computer in my classroom that actually works so that I can implement the literacy and numeracy activities into my daily classroom programme - hopefully it will arrive in the next two weeks. I lost all my data from my teacher's laptop due to not backing it up and problems with our school server so I now have to restart the powerpoint presentation and collect a whole lot of digital photos of the children in action again. I will be completing the power point ready to show to parents and caregivers in week 6 of this term. I will let you know how I get on. I have enjoyed doing the blog and have mastered adding photos, comments etc and find it easy to do on a weekly basis. I have found it's a whole lot easier to do a blog then it was for me to do the class webpage. (not sure if this is now due to my increase in computer knowledge or not!!) I want to add further links to my blog and also still learn how to do podcasts properly. I found the Point England Junior Strategy very good.

Hi Maureen. I happy to help you with podcasting - I could even send some Garageband 'experts' down to you to train up your children. What did you think of the Expo this year? Stu

Thanks Stu that would be great. Room 2 would love some big experts. Now for an update of what has been happening regarding ICT in room 2 - We have tried a variety of things with ICT being incorporated much more into my programme. The presentation that I planned for the parent information evening was to be in powerpoint but due to the change to a pod laptop I made my presentation in Keynote. I was very pleased with it as it was the first time I had worked with Keynote. I have used the pod laptops and my new classroom computer at different stages throughout the day as part of literacy, numeracy or inquiry times and am enjoying the rotation of this. I loved the trip to Auckland and was especially pleased to see the Point England strategy in action. It is always good to learn what other schools are doing and to realise how far on the journey we are in comparison. During our inquiry entitled 'Friendly Footprints' we used google earth to show the new entrants where they lived and what route the walking bus to school would take.

For the last three weeks of term 2 I decided to focus on working with the various tools in Kidpix. I got my class experts to set up and show the other children how to access the fish. They then had to use the pencil, colour swatch and bucket to create scales, different patterns on the fish shape and also put in a background. As a response to Greedy Cat stories in reading each child then used the above tools and also altered the thickness of the pencil to draw their own cat before writing exciting stories to go with it. I have continued with the blog and also used bubbleshare, picture trail and slide to show photos so families can see some of what their child is doing at school during the day.

The expo in the holidays was great. Thanks very much to the organisers and the workshop presenters. I found both speakers were excellent and gave us food for thought. It was also good to catch up with colleagues from the other schools again. The workshops were practical and gave us lots of other ideas to try. I liked the year group feedback session even though it was short. I was very impressed to see the range of work on the display boards and the quality of them - some amazing stuff from our youngest students.

Term 3 - Week 1 - The children were introduced to more tools on Kidpix with the focus being on writing their names in many different fonts and colours and also writing a sentence independently. During their visit to the lab they showed the newest New Entrants what they had been learning. This week they were introduced to the Letterland programme on the pod laptops which went very well. In mathematics our current topic is geometry. Next week they will be learning how to use the digital cameras and go outside (if the weather is fine enough!!) to take photos of the different shapes around our school and they will be introduced to the digital learning objects. This term I want to continue exploring the Kidpix programme. We will be doing a slide show using an alphabet sound focus and podcasting.