Story Board Planning

 Kia ora ano e tatou ma, story board planning is a cool way to get students to map out their own stories before putting it together either in writing or by video clip. Here is a sample that I gave my students in order to get them thinking about what they wanted to say. 

Novel Study - See Ya Simon

 This Term we have studied a novel called See Ya Simon by David Hill. David is a New Zealand author and the story was based on a 14 year old boy called Simon, who had muscular dystrophy. Although Simon had this debilitating disease it did not stop him enjoying life to the full, attending school and having great friends around him. One of the chapters was able poem writing in their English class and they likened it to creating layers of an onion. Each layer had its own ideas which formed the poem. Our class turned it into an excercise about writing a poem about ourselves. Here is my example of the poems we wrote in class. 

 

2023 - Term 1 Learning with 9T English

 Kia ora koutou, this year has started well for my Year 9 Totara class of 27 students. Due to the chrome books taking a while to get into the hands of our year 9 students we switched and started with our speeches. This was a big ask for these new students who barely know each other and asking them to create and deliver a speech in front of the whole class. However, they perservered, put their heads down and got on with the task. The three topics were (1) Someone I admire (2) An issue in school or the community (3) Determination creates success. In week five all but one student completed and delivered their speech, they were amazing. We then moved onto completing Biography's which should have taken five weeks but only took three. Therefore we were able to move onto our Novel study which was meant to have started in Term 2, but these students are so quick and onto it. They have started two weeks early. Here is a photo of this year awesome 9T English class. I am looking forward to this year of leaning. 

Film Study

 Kia ora ano. This Term 3 we are learmning about Film Studies and in particular film techniques with my students. One of the techneques we looked at was mise en s'cene - or put in the scene. This is where students look at the set design, costumes, props, compsition, lighting and the general visual environment. 

In order to highlight this technique we decided to creat our own scenes using the backround removal app to pop characters, people, animals, props into our created scene. 

Here is my simple example of what we are creating. 

Creative Writing

Kia ora koutou, this week we have had a teacher trainee Caitlin Thomas, who is studying at the Auckland University, come in and teach our 9T English students creative writing using the SEXE paragraph writing technique. In lesson one students were asked to chose a favorite song, locate and highlight all the nouns, adverbs and adjectives. This activity took a couple of lessons. Yesterday Caitlin worked with the whole class. They chose one song Gangster Paradise by Coolio to study. Using the SEXE paragraph model they started with a statement and what the song is about. They explained in greater detail, their thoughts. They then gave an example by way of a quote from the lyrics, and followed this up with another example before ending with an open link for further discussion. Here is the work our students completed in a lesson.  

2022 Starting with 9T English

Kia ora koutou katoa This year will be my second year teaching Year 9 English with students from the Totara Reo Rua Unit. There are currently 28 students and they are amazing young people very keen to learn and increase their knowledge at Secondary School level. During the first three weeks when we realised we would not have our chrome books until later in the Term, we jumped straight to our second unit which was Speeches. The three topics were (1) an issue at school or in the community, (2) someone I admire (3) determination creates success. It was amazing how many chose the third topic and the content of what they wrote and spoke about was inspiring. I can see very clearly that this group of students are going to be a preasure to teach. I am looking forward to the year ahead.

Back at School under Alert Level 2

Kia ora koutou
We have been back at school for the past two weeks and although only two thirds of the school returned and the students have been locked down in their Form Class bubbles all day, they seem to  be enjoying the experience. We are currently learning about Migration in Year 9 Social Studies but in order to give the students more digital learning tools Whaea Kerry Boyd-Preece joins us for one hour per week and broadens their knowlege base with exciting digital learning lessons. Recently they have been creating cartoon portraits or avatars and I have created one to show what they are learning. It is a bit basic but it was fun to create.