OUR WRITING BLOG

This is a guest post written by Lara on behalf of the GEMS.

We created a writing blog for us to share our writing with others and teach us how to post. Our blog is called 2m Writing Gems.

This blog helps us open up our writing to others around the world. It also helps us to improve our writing and get quicker with our typing.

As we are writing and before we publish, we focus on the CUPS.

The CUPS are-

C - is for capitals. Do I have a capital to start my sentences and for the names of people, places and things

U- is for understanding. Does my writing make sense?

P-is for punctuation. Have I used my full stops, commas, exclamation marks,

question marks or speech marks?

S-is for spelling. Are all my words spelt correctly on my post?

At the moment, we are writing recounts but later on in the year, we will be attempting other text types like stories, descriptions, opinions and explanations.

We'd LOVE for you to encourage us with our writing so please visit our Writing Blog often and leave comments that will help us become better writers.

WHAT'S THIS NEW ADDITION TO OUR ROOM?

Gems,


Meet the new addition to our classroom. 
I adopted him at the workshop I'm attending today.



What do you think it is?
What does it remind you of?
What do you think we can do with it?
How will it help our learning?


I'd love for you to leave your responses as a comment....and then you'll just have to be patient.
You'll meet out new friend on Monday.


Have a great weekend.


Mrs M

WE WANT TO KNOW ABOUT EARTHQUAKES

We have been talking a lot about people in Haiti and Chile. We can't begin to understand how hard life must be for them.

Our discussions lead to us talking about earthquakes.

For us to better understand what life is like for people who are affected by earthquakes, we need to know about earthquakes.

Below is a wallwisher to help us rcord the question we have that will guide our inquiry.

HAVE YOU WIMPED YOURSELF?

We love reading the 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' books...

and we love the website Wimp Yourself.

Wimp Yourself is a cool avatar generator site where you can create cartoon characters just like those in the 'Wimpy Kids' books. You can save the avatar you create in small, medium or large sizes.





Maybe you could create a whole lot of different characters and use them to write your own stories, maybe even your own 'Wimpy Kid' diaries.


Whatever you choose to do, we're sure there'll be lots of laughs and fun.

2M's BLOGGING TIPS#1: HOW TO COMMENT ON A BLOGGER BLOG

Many of our parents are wanting help leaving comments on our blog.

After we saw Keely's screencast, we decided it was time to start a series of 'how to' screencasts.

So here is the first in our Blogging Tip screencasts, created by Lara.

Happy commenting!

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO ADD A VIRTUAL PET TO YOUR BLOG, YOU'VE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE!

Before the end of the term, we will all have our own blogs up and running.

Some of the Gems already know how to blog because they have older brothers or sisters who have taught them.

Keely, in our class, has a number of play blogs. On these blogs she has lots of virtual pets.

Of course we all want one on our own blogs, so we asked Keely to show us how.

Here is a screencast of HOW TO ADD A VIRTUAL PET TO A BLOGGER BLOG.

THANK YOU KEELY!!

Now we don't have to keep on asking Keely.

We can watch the screencast any time...and so can you!

REFLECTING ON WORLD MATHS DAY

We are still buzzing about World Maths Day last week, so we decided to start collecting our reflections in a Voicethread.

Please keep coming back to check on the comments that have been added. If you took part in World Maths Day, we'd love you to leave a comment to or maybe you want to ask us a question. All you need is a Voicethread account, login and comment away!

IT'S WORLD MATHS DAY

Today, March 3, is World Maths Day!


It is an web event where you compete against other kids around the world in mental maths challenges.

Taking part in World Maths Day helps you develop speed and accuracy with your mental maths facts.
There are over 2 million students from 37,000 schools in 200 countries taking part and every question we all answer correctly, helps us try to break last years record of 452,681,681 correctly answered questions.

Each of us had two 20 minute game sessions over the day. Most of our competitors were from the USA, Canada, England, New Zealand and of course Australia but some of us competed against kids from Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia too.


It was really tricky typing in our answers quickly but our practice on Mathletics has helped and it became easier with each game. Many of us won most of our games and some of us even achieved the level of 'human calculator'. By 3:00pm, some of us had played over 50 games!


The video below shows the fun we had taking part in World Maths Day and do you know what the best part is?
We get to do it all again tomorrow because it will still be March 3 in other parts of the 
world!

ARE YOU ON MATHLETICS?

WE ARE...AND WE LOVE IT!

Mathletics makes learning Maths fun.

The activities and games help us understand maths concepts and Mathletics LIVE helps us become quicker and more accurate with our mental maths facts. It is really cool to practice our maths facts as we compete against others around the world.

Mrs M sets us tasks to work through. We
can keep track of how we are going and if we don't understand something, we can go to Support to be stepped through the task.


We can also go to Rainforest Maths and play some games there to help us understand concepts better.

Once we have completed all of our set tasks, then we can go onto Mathletics LIVE to compete in mental maths challenges against children from around the world.

Every task we complete earns us points and we are awarded certificates along the way.
After 2 weeks, 16 of us have been awarded one or more bronze certificates for earning a 1000 or more points in a week.
Jack was our Week 1 Mathlete of the Week and Malachy was our Mathlete for Week 2.

We'd love to know if you are using Mathletics too.
What you love best about it?
What do you find challenging?

VOICES OF THE WORLD

We are taking part in a worldwide, collaborative project called - VOICES of the WORLD.


This exciting project was created by Sharon Tonner to unite children around the world using voice and sound. Mrs Tonner used to be an ICT Specialist at The High School Of Dundee in Scotland and is now a Lecturer in Primary Education at The University Of Dundee. The 2007 and 2008 Gems took part in this project and now it's our turn to develop our use of online tools whilst sharing our voice with other classrooms around the world.

Every month we will be given a task to create an audio file that will be posted on the  VOICES of the WORLD wiki.

The February task was to use a VOKI to introduce ourselves in our own (native) language. Everyone had to say...

'Hello. Voices of the World. (school name and country) Goodbye'.

Here's our voki!


Get a Voki now!


You can check out maps on the VOTW wiki to see where all the other 2010  participating classes are around the world and listen to their vokis too.


Are there any languages you recognize?