5/6C’s Class Blog 2008

Miss Wyatt found this site, Wordcount, on someone else’s blog. I found it on her class blog. Now you’ve found it on our blog – the wonders of networking!

This site is fascinating; did you know that chocolate is the 4,204th most used word in English? Or that James is number 1000? The is the most commonly used word, and conquistador comes last in the database, at 86,800th!

Check out the wordle for a few others I picked out, then go and search yourself!

It’s only been ten days since the “lucky” date, 08/08/08. Today, we made it to 8888 hits on our blog!  Ooooh, coincidence? Perhaps… or not. Post your thoughts.

We’ve been working on VoiceThreads for a couple of weeks now. The process was this:

1. Plan the Story. This involved designing a storyboard with a section for each part of the story – these sections became the pages of our VoiceThread.
2. Draft the Script. This is where we took our initial ideas and turned them into a more detailed story. We planned what we would say in our recordings.
3. Finding Pictures. Then we spent ages collecting the pictures we needed to tell our story. We got them from a range of sources: Flickr, ToonDoo, Microsoft Paint, our own photographs, Kid Pix and our own drawings.
4. Redraft the Story. Then we checked that our story matched the pictures we had found. We made changes to the script so that it sounded fantastic.
5. Produce the VoiceThread. We uploaded our photos to our own VoiceThread and then added our voice comments. Most of us remembered to switch user to our own username, but a couple of us forgot!
6. Embed in your Blog. We had trouble with this because our own blogs are on Learnerblogs and VoiceThread won’t embed into them. Sad.   So we are embedding them into this blog on our VoiceThread page and putting a link on our own blogs so people can find our work.

Image: RuneT on Flickr

In the 1920s, famous author Ernest Hemingway bet ten dollars that he could write a complete story in just six words. He wrote: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  He won the bet, for in those six words is a complete tale.

Writing a memoir in six words has become a popular challenge with many websites showing thousands of peoples’ stories. Apparently it all began with Larry Smith of Smith’s Magazine who read about Ernest Hemmingway’s bet and challenged his readers to send in their own six word stories. Some thirty thousand stories later, and a book (”Not Quite What I Was Planning”), the six word story is alive and well.

One third grade class in South Jersey made a book of their responses, called “Not Quite What We Were Planning”. Quotes from that book include:

“Eight years old, combed hair twice.” -Noah
“Hate some boys but like others.” – Sarah
“Wish everyday was a bed day.” – Emily
“Nine years stacked within my soul.” – Laura
“A kids life is my life.” – Kion

There are many websites with more six word stories.Some are funny, some are sad and some are just plain weird, but they’re all interesting (although some are a bit rude – stick to the links here kids!) Al Upton’s grade did a great job of this task – follow the link to read some of their ideas. Then you can head to the Voices Online wiki, choose a picture and construct a thoughtful 6 word response.

Image: akahodag from Flickr.

We’ve been busy having meetings with students, their parents and Mrs C, looking at what would be appropriate learning goals to aim for by the end of the year. All students showed that they are able to identify an appropriate goal which will help them to develop their skills and learn better.
A common focus for many of our class members was to become fluent at their times tables. To do this, they will need to learn every fact by heart. When we broke this task down together, we found this wasn’t as hard as it may have seemed – in fact, many students had only about 20 equations to learn to achieve this goal! We’ll report back on our progress soon.

Image made with Wordle.

Today, August 8, 2008 is an interesting date, as it can be written 08/08/08. When was the last time such a pattern occurred? When will be the next?

Recently we used Excel to make pie graphs of how we spend a normal school day. Firstly, we had to keep a tally sheet of how we used each hour of the day. Then we combined similar activities so that we didn’t have too many categories; this way our graph would be clear and easier to compare with the graphs of other class members. Once we had our category titles and hours, we put the information into an Excel spreadsheet and used the chart wizard to turn our data into a pie graph. Finally we got to play around with formatting options – it was interesting how all of our graphs started looking the same but ended up looking unique!

Finally, we converted our graphs into JPEG files using Paint, and we uploaded them to individual blogs. Here’s Robert’s work: