Learning in Context

This week we had a group of students from Japan arrive at Rangeview.  We greeted them on Wednesday morning with a whole school Powhiri, and as many of the students in our ALL group are also in Kapa Haka, we felt it was important that the students attended this event.

The students shared with us information about Japan, and also their school - Atagohama.  This was a great example of report writing in action - with factual information that had specifically been designed for our students.  It also provided a great context for us to compare the quality of information we had written in our own reports and reconsider whether it was the best information to have included.

This week we also spent some time talking about the importance of a really strong introduction.  We talked about how the introduction of a report is where you will convince the reader that it is worth taking the time to read the rest of what you have written.

I have started putting together the Powerpoint presentation that we are using within our ALL group.  This will be added to in preparation for each session, and by putting it here it means that you, as parents are able to talk through these key points with your child, and they are also able to access it to support them with their learning in other classes here at school.

Teaching and Learning Resources to support ALL students.  Click to view.

We have been using these resources to rework the introductions for our reports that we started last week.  We started by improving our own introduction, before sharing this in small groups for feedback.  We then identified the best parts from each and used these to recreate a collaborative introduction on the HP streams.

Here is the link to our collaborative report 

We will be working to complete this next week before choosing an Olympics based theme to write our next report on.  The highlighted words in these introductions indicate the topic specific vocabularly that was used.  These words were selected by members of the other group, helping them to engage in and critically read the work of others.