Our principal, Mr Don, retires

At the end of our first term 2010 our Principal, Mr Stuart Don, retired. He was a young boy at our school and then spent his whole teaching life at the school, first as a teacher, then a deputy principal, and finally as principal for many years. He was given a tremendous send-off by staff, parents and pupils as he was a highly-respected principal. My task as the computer teacher was to create a PowerPoint presentation for Mr Don's farewell party. I have uploaded it here using authorstream which converts PowerPoint for web use. What I didn't think about was the use of fonts. When you transfer PowerPoint you have to beware of using fancy fonts - they often reflect with incorrect capitalisation and size! Oh well...

MR DON'S FAREWELL

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Innovative Teacher's workshop

I had such a lovely weekend (at the end of March) presenting the Microsoft Innovative Teachers' course to a group of wonderfully enthusiastic teachers. Wow! The 2010 course has been updated by two local 2008 Innovative Teacher winners and we enjoyed the new approach. If any South African teachers are reading this post, why don’t you consider entering the competition and developing your project this term? Entries have to be in by the end of the June holidays. All you need to do is take something you already do in your classroom, make it innovative and add some form of technology to it. For more information go to: http://www.schoolnet.org.za/itf/index.htm

There is also an online workshop to help you tweak your ideas: http://www.schoolnet.org.za/innovation/index.htm

Grade 2 Theunissen takes part in the weather project with Switzerland

Here is Maggie’s Grade 2s in Swizerland skyping with Alaska, New Jersey in the USA, Cape Town and Bangkok in Thailand. In this voicethread you can see photos of scenes in the different countries, along with our own Grade 2T and scenes in Cape Town. Can you find the photo of Miss Theunissen’s class? We would like to say thank you again to Maggie in Switzerland for sending these on to us. Next term we hope to add our comments to the voicethreads.

http://voicethread.com/share/953807/

Miss Southern's Grade 2 class also skypes with a Grade 2 class inSwitzerland

Maggie from Swizerland has sent us another voicethread after skyping with our Miss Southerm’s Grade 2 class. Yippee! (All three of our Grade 2s skyped with different Grade 2s in Switzerland). In this voicethread you can see the Grade2s in Switzerland skyping with Grade 2s in Madrid in Spain, Melbourne in Australia, Vancouver Island in Canada , and our Own Grade 2Southern in Cape Town. You will see a photo of Miss Southern’s class in this voicethread.


http://voicethread.com/share/953920/

Grade 2McQueen takes part in a weather project with Switzerland.

Our three Grade 2 classes have been on a Skype weather project with three Grade 2 classes at the International School of Zug and Luzern in Switzerland. This was a first for us - skyping with another school, asking questions and sharing photographs, and it was a wonderful experience. I must thank Maggie Hos-McGrane, the computer integration teacher from Switzerland, for including us in this project. Maggie has put together three Voicethreads about the project. Here is the first one. This voicethread was done after skyping with Alaska, Honolulu in Hawaii, Florida in the USA, Tanzania in Africa and our own Grade 2 McQueen in Cape Town. There are quite a few photos of our school in this Voicethread as well as a photo of Miss McQueen's class.

http://voicethread.com/?#q.b953700.i5104391

Our Grade 5 Monster Project

This year Mrs Beagley's class is involved in a global literacy and technology project called 'The Monster Project' (with Mrs Beal in the computer handling the computer technology side). Are you wondering what the 'Monster Project' is all about? Well, 38 classes from around the world are collaborating in building monsters, reading and writing monster stories, telling monster jokes and more. Each class had to write in with a photo and a brief description about themselves. This is what we wrote about Grade 5B



This Monster Project is the brainchild of Mr Smith in the USA. Mr Smith sent all the participants the link to a talk by Dr Sruart Brown, a researcher on the importance of play and fun in childhood.
http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html

This is how the project works. A monster is divided up into 38 parts and all the participating classes take one part. We have the earings! Each class comes up with 8 - 12 adjectives of how their adopted part should look. This is how Grade 5B described the earings.



Then the children in the class design a monster according to the specifications of all the other classes! In November all 38 classes around the world will vote on who has kept the closest to the descriptions in all the parts.

Here you can see the beginning of the project where everybody in Grade 5B is thinking!



They start to design a monster according to the descriptions given. Mrs Beagley will select one of these designs.




The monster is coming on! Eyeballs, tails and ears!






On Tuesday 40 teachers who are country winners in the Innovative Teacher Competition (finals are being held in Cape Town) are visiting our school for two hours. We will show them the monster and tell them about the project!To find out more about this project visit the Monster project website.
http://www.smithclass.org/proj/Monsters/index.htm

Latest picture of the monster.