Spelling Assessment

Today me (Jordan) and the rest of the class had to do a spelling assesment to go in our Learning Portfolio. I got 20/20 for my proofreading skills 5/5 for suffixes and last one 4/5 for adding suffixes. We reflected on our spelling results using the 6 thinking hats, the Green hat or the creative hat, White hat or facts hat and the red hat or the feelings hat. Those people who did not finish their assesment will be completing it on Monday.

By Jordan

An afternoon with Mandy Hager

Today room 12 had to Line-up At 1.20pm to go to the Kapiti Public Library because we were going to meet a Teens Fiction Writer by the name of Mandy Hager. Mandy shared with us some pages of nearly every book she wrote I’ll share some with you.

• Run to the trees about a boy who is Dyslexic and has to stay with His Uncle Who is Trying to Save a forest down in the South island of New Zealand.

• Smashed about a Half Asian and half Pakeha Boy Who makes Friends with two of the most Trouble makers in the School one has A.D.H.D and the other is a person who is sooo into cars.

• The last one is a series of a Trilogy Called the Crossing about a Islander Girl who thinks she is the only one left in the world but White people come and she becomes one of them.

Then when Mandy had finished telling us about the stories she has written Mr. Madge asked “How do you do your proof reading”. Mandy said “ I give them to either my daughter or my Mum and they check for mistakes if there are any they give the story back and I go and correct my mistakes”. Then when Mandy had finished speaking I (Jordan) got up and said“ On behalf of room 12 I would like to say a big thank you”

Jordan :-)

Learning Portfolios

In room 12 we are working on developing our new learning portfolios. It covers the curriculum areas allowing students to share their learning with their peers, parents, teachers and others. We expect to use these at student/parent/teacher interviews, and students will be bringing them home in terms two and four to share at home. More details to follow soon.

Incentive Day Term 1

Mr Madge believes in rewarding thoses students who do well consistently throughout the term. So at the end of term one we had our class incentive day, the theme for the day was games. To earn the right to participate we had to demonstrate over the term that we were able work well in the following area:

• Spelling
• Work Completion
• Followinginstructions
• Behaviour

It was great that most of us earned the right to participate. People brought board games, play stations, X-box, music and other games.
We had a connect 4 competition and Tei won, she is pictured below:

Those students who did not earn the right completed school work all day.They will be working harder next term, I'm sure.

Trying a new online tool for writing

We are trying a new online tool for writing. Here is Nakita's first attempt:
Nakita's first go

Personal Responses

We have recently begun looking in more detail at personal responses. We have used online mind-mapping tool bubbl.us to help us brainstorm. So far we have the following ideas. Can you think of any more that could be added, or, how the listed ones could be improved?

Zeros that do not affect the value

Today in mathematics we looked at zeros in numbers that do not affect their value.
When writing decimals one or more zeros can be added to the right of the decimal point, after the last digit, without affecting the value of the number.
For example:
4.2 = 4.20 = 4.200
2.5 = 2.50 = 2.500

Can you think of any other examples?

Compact and expanded form

One way to help us understand large numbers is to write the numerals in expanded form:

Compact form - 4326

Expanded form - 4000 + 300 + 20 + 6 or (4×1000) + (3×100) + (2×10) + (6×1)

How would you write 3452 in expanded form?

How do we do this for decimals? Easy!

Whole numbers			∙	Fractions/Decimals
Hundreds	Tens	Ones	∙	Tenths	Hundreths
	8	2	∙	3	7

We say 82.37 as “eighty two point three, seven”.

82.37 is the compact form.

In expanded form 82.37 = (8 × 10) + (2 × 1) + (3 × 0.1) + (7 × 0.01)

Or 80 + 2 + 0.3 + 0.07

Mathematics involving money

Close to all our hearts in year 7 & 8 is money. Today we were learning to:

• round money amounts to the nearest $1.00
• round money amounts to the nearest $10.00
• round money amounts to the nearest $100.00

Rounding down or up amounts helped us to estimate the cost of buying a number of items at the same time.

Can you round these amounts to the nearest $1.00
$5.85  $37.15  $58.35

Can you round these amounts to the nearest $10.00
$15.75  $87.99  $28.70

Can you round these amounts to the nearest $100.00
$367.75  $87.99  $549.70

Why would having good estimation skills help us?
You know roughly how much your spending (Courtney)
You know if you're spending too much (Crystal)
So you can budget with your money (Emily)

Formal English in room 12

Each week we complete language fitness activities. We are looking at the following areas:
Nouns; verbs; prefixes; suffixes; synonyms; antonyms; homonyms; homophones; abbreviations; contractions; singular/plural; adjectives; adverbs; pronouns; tenses; conjunctions; prepositions; comparatives and superlatives; phrases and root words.
Throughout the year we will be discussing the different groups above and adding examples. We are sure this will help us with our understanding.