08 Bright Sparks

Bright Sparks will represent the country of New Zealand at our school Mini Olympics. Over the next few weeks we will be researching information about New Zealand culture and customs. If you are able to assist us with our research, please leave a comment. We would love to hear from some students in New Zealand.

Today Bright Sparks had to choose a country for our class to be in the school mini Olympics. Our top 3 choices were Australia, China and New Zealand. Then we had to choose which sport our class would like to do. William chose running and Cain chose  cricket. The most popular sports in our class were “Swim Fishy Swim”, t- ball and soccer. In 5 weeks we are starting our school mini Olympics. During the mini Olympics the host class will be teaching the visiting class how to play their chosen sport or game. The school SRC will be making the final decision about  which country and sports each class will be doing.

By William and Cain

This week Bright Sparks tried a new Visible Thinking routine called “I See, I Think, I Wonder” using the Olympic Flag as a stimulus to introduce one the topics we will be studying this term. The great thing about this routine is that every Bright Spark had a chance to contribute their thoughts and opinions. As their teacher, I was very excited to see all students keen to participate and contribute their ideas. These are just a few of some of the very interesting thoughts they contributed about the Olympic Flag.

“I see rainbow circles. They are a symbol for the Beijing Olympics. I wonder why they are circles?” Farah

“I see circles connected to each other. I think the ring’s colours are very bright. I wonder why they are stuck to each other?” Destiny

“I see lots of circles. I think the circles are bright colours. I wonder why they are circles, not squares?” Mahnoor

“I see circles stuck together. I think that they make patterns. I wonder why they use those colours?” Ayse

The students have now researched information about the Olympic Flag and are able to answer the questions they were “wondering” about.

On Tuesday 1st July the Stage 2 classes had a spelling competition to select two students to represent our school in the Premier’s Spelling Bee later on this year. Each class had their own competition and selected the two best spellers. Then the best two spellers from each class competed against each other. We had the final competion in the hall. Six students sat in chairs in front of the Stage 2 audience. Our teacher read out each word and the students had to spell the word aloud. At the end of 5 rounds we had 2 winners, but it was a very close competition.

This week we have been very busy witing our storyboards to go with the movies we created using Movie Maker.  We made a checklist with our teacher to make sure that our storyboards had all the necessary parts and were written neatly with correct spelling and punctuation. Now the storyboards are finished we are going to use Audacity to record our written text, add music and then upload our narrations into our movies. Some very clever Bright Sparks have finished their digital stories already. They can be seen on our class wiki under the Digital Stories link.