Wednesday 27 November 2013

Learning a musical Instrument

I wonder if you have heard the noise coming from Room 9 lately? We have 10 guitars, 10 ukuleles, 1 bass, and 1 keyboard set up! We are learning a whole bunch of songs to perform somewhere (yet to be confirmed where!). After a guitar lesson Alex and Arlo created this video tutorial to demonstrate their learning! Awesome work boys! Looking forward to hearing the whole song!

Thursday 21 November 2013

Successful Speeches

WALHT Write and perform a speech:

Successful Speeches

The key thing about speeches is that the audience's  brain has to keep up with your ideas. If you keep giving them too many ideas in a row their brain doesn't have time to process what you are saying so that they can understand it.

Think about when your teachers are teaching you something new and you just need us to slow down or stop because we are giving you too much information at once. When you give a speech you have to stretch out your idea to give your audience's brain time to 'catch up.'

One way to do this in a speech is to follow a 'recipe' with each new idea:
1. Your introduction hooks the audience in and describes your analogy choice eg planting seeds

2. this is your first sentence and gives the audience a clue what you idea is about eg learning is like a growing seed.

3. the next 1-2 sentences elaborate on your idea by giving more detail (this part allows the audience's brain to think about what you said in the first sentence).

4. These 1-2 sentences give an example so the audience can understand your idea in different situations. You might give more than one example eg what teachers, learning tasks, other experiences relate to this analogy?

5. Add any evidence; like specific words that can support your analogy. This helps the audience to believe what you are telling them and makes your speech more convincing eg. fertilise,

6. Finish your speech by 'tying up' all these parts with your main idea by summarising your main points. This reminds your audience of your analogy and helps them to remember about your learning journey at RSS.

7. Your last sentence will be particularly powerful and relate to your anaology in a way that connects your analogy choice to learning eg. tomato sauce is the product of a successful tomato plant.

If you follow this 'recipe' with each of your main ideas of your speech it will be really powerful and more memorable.

As for performance look at Caitlin's speech from 2012. What do you notice about her stance, voice, eyes, manner etc? How does she perform her speech?

Monday 11 November 2013

Save the Orangutans


Hey, it is Save the Orangutans Week and a student at my school has created this movie to inform the people about his quest to save Orangutans. I have just been hanging out with Liam this morning, in a monkey suit, while he spoke to the school, and then to the Manawatu Standard. His goal is to get 1000 views on youtube, let's help him get 10, 000!! Please share and check your chocolate for traces of Palm Oil. http://youtu.be/wdtQLf8M7GQ

Monday 4 November 2013

Awesome Movie

Hey - I was astounded by the quality of learning going on in e9.  People are stepping up and rising to the challenge of making their learning amazing! Awesome role models - Josiah and Aimen!