5/6C’s Class Blog 2008

”Once upon a time lived a girl named Tracey. But thats in the past of course, she’s dead now. I’m here to tell you the classic story of How My Friend Was Murdered!
It was a dreadful night and the rain was pouring but worst of all, there was a killer in sight. Her name was Micky and she was known for her craziness of murdering people with an axe.
That night Tracey was out for a walk as well as her chooks on a leash. She saw a dark shadow in the distance. Suddenly it came charging for poor young Tracey. Tracey reconised the muscley figure of Micky and decided to start sprinting.
Tracey was much too fast for Micky and her tough abs so instead she just threw the axe straight into Tracey’s back. But that didn’t stop Tracey, she kept running with the blood running down her back and on to her chooks.
Eventually Tracey started to slow down from starvation so she headed towards her mega shredder factory where she put all of her chooks into a mega shredder and ate them all up. Except for one which she ate raw. Just as Tracey was licking her fingers from such a good meal she forgot all about the killer that had been stalking her. When Tracey wasn’t looking, Micky and her evil powers pushed Tracey right into the largest shredder. Out the other end came Tracey sliced, shredded and dead.” 

”AND THAT’S THE STORY OF HOW MY FRIEND WAS MURDERED!”

The End

By Stacey and Nikita

A couple of weeks ago our class went out to plant a plant called, “Red Chocolate”.  Everyone was a part of it and some people had to move a plant that was in the wrong spot. All classes had a plant to plant. There was a pattern for where the plants went. It went green, purple, green and so on. There were different types of plants – there are longifolia “Katrinus”, “Apricot Queen” and “Red Chocolate”.

Everyone got their hands dirty, especially  the ones that were playing in the mud by digging the hole. We got the “Red Chocolate” plant because our teacher is mad about chocolate!

It looks great outside near the office now. Everyone had a great time helping to plant the plant

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

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:

We have two new students in our grade – welcome to Charlie and Ricky; it’s great to have you on board, boys.

Keep an eye out on our Student Blogs page for Charlie’s and Ricky’s new blogs – they just need to choose their theme, add a couple of widgets and then start posting. Stay tuned for their updates.

Image made with Tag Galaxy and Jing.

Freya is leaving us to travel through Asia for the rest of the school year – what a fantastic adventure. We hope she will keep in contact through her blog. Have a wonderful trip, Freya; you will be missed! When she returns, Freya will be going straight to high school.

On her last day, following our new tradition, Freya got to be “Queen of the Chair” – that means she got to sit in the recliner whenever she wanted to. She made herself a crown and generally did whatever she wanted (within reason, of course! Freya was Queen of the Chair but Mrs C remains Queen of the Classroom!)

Picture from Classroom Clipart

Today Mariah left our school to go to another town. We will miss her because she is such a friendly, happy classmate who tries hard and looks after everyone.

Because she was leaving us Mariah got to be Queen of the Chair – she got to use it whenever she wanted, except when Mrs C needed to recline more than Mariah did. The new chair sure is popular! For her last day Mariah had slaves who looked after her every need – here they are looking after her on her last day with us.

Most class members now have their own personal blogs with links to these found on the “Student Blogs” page (see link above). Students will use their blogs for a variety of purposes including sharing ideas, publishing writing and asking for feedback. Each student will be able to chose their own theme for their blog – so far the most popular choice seems to be pink! Parents are welcome – encouraged, in fact – to read and comment on their student’s  – and any other grade members’ – blog.