Competition is alive and well!

This term our English classes are focusing on two types of writing: Report Writing and Persuasive Writing.  These two text types compliment each other quite nicely as in order to convince someone of something, you need to be able to support it with factual information.

With this in mind, we started the week with a Venn Diagram that helped to show the difference between Narrative writing (that they students did last term) and what they already knew about report writing.  Through discussion we came to the realisation that there are some features that are important in both text types.

This week we started to compile a list of all of the things we know about Rangeview.  We needed to consider what ideas were important to share with others (purpose), who would be interested in reading this information (audience), and we needed to ensure that our ideas were appropriate.

This was more challenging for the students than they initially thought and even though we created Popplets on the iPads, it took a while for us to get some appropriate ideas onto our brainstorm.

We revisited this activity in our second session, and turned it into a collaborative competition.  The students were split into two groups, each with a different colour pen.  They were given 10 minutes to come up with as many different ideas as they could - this was much more successful and the students were a lot more motivated!

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We then looked at the school website and prospectus, and for the next 10 minutes added any new ideas we found in our research in a different coloured pen.

The next step was to think about how we were going to group our ideas that were similiar.  When we looked at the chart, the students suggested the following groups:

We categorised our ideas into these groups using the corresponding symbols:

The students then used this information to independently write a report about Rangeview Intermediate School.  This report has given me great information about what the students currently are able to demonstrate in their report writing, and highlighted some important areas for us to work on over the next few weeks.  More on this later!

Next week I will also be popping into each of the students English classes to observe how they are working and what learning they are finding most engaging.  I'm looking forward to the opportunity to see how they interact with others across their different learning areas and to reflect these successes in our ALL group time.