Friday, September 20, 2013

Gandhi Parts 1 and 2


Gandhi Part 1 Room 16 from Kieren Moriarty on Vimeo.

Please watch our Gandhi movie. It tells the story of two great men and the birth of a nation. The movie was directed by Hannah and Tracey and stars Teva, Sam, Hannah, Ben, Lily, Jessica, Crighton, Dylan and Room 16 as the crowd. It is also screening at the Parkvale Arts exhibition which features our henna hands and Taj Mahal art.


Gandhi Part 2 Room 16 from Kieren Moriarty on Vimeo.



Speaking of the arts exhibition, today I felt privileged to see our hall filled with the sparkling art of our 21 classes, based on many cultures around the globe. It looks amazing.

Here is a great quote from Mr Gifkins which sums it up: "I am blown away by my visit to the school hall. The exhibition is BRILLIANT! AMAZING! FANTASTIC! AWESOME! and UNBELIEVABLE. I am very proud to walk into the hall and look around at the exceptional quality of work achieved by our pupils under the amazing teaching and guidance of you all. You are simply superb!! The hall is exploding with PRIDE."

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Room 16's India

Our India topic has been wonderful. We have been cooking Indian food with Inderpreet's and Hemani's mums. Imaan's mum has created real henna with most of the girls and also shared food. We have learnt about henna, the wonderful architecture and love story of the Taj Mahal, and really enjoyed the music and dance of Bollywood.


Poster by Elijah and Sam

In the last week of term, we are sharing our art in the Parkvale Arts Festival. If you scan our poster for the exhibition using the Aurasma augmented reality app, you will be able to watch our Bollywood trailer (which is also embedded below). Each class will have a poster featuring their own Aurasma for their arts display. All Room 16 students' Indian artworks also have a unique Aurasma video, which you will be able to scan at the art festival.



Room 16 About India from Room16 Parkvale on Vimeo.

Coming soon: Our Mahatma Ghandi movies (in two parts)!

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Basic Facts

Room 16 have been practising our basic facts (number knowledge). We have had 10 tests. Each test has 25 questions. We put our daily results into a stem and leaf graph. At first we would do this for our raw scores out of 25. We would also find the middle score (the median). Then times the raw scores by 4 to get a percentage score. This works because 25 x 4 = 100.
See my example below for converting a score of 20 out 25 into a percentage.


We then worked out the mean (average) and the range, to go with the median (in percent). Here are our stem and leaf graphs for our percentage scores on days three and four.

Stem and Leaf Graphs from Days 3 and 4

The students used Google Spreadsheet to record their scores and create graphs (charts). Here is one I created for the class results.


The students achieved their highest mean score of 80% on day 6. They managed a mean (average) score of around 70% from day 3 on. I am very proud of them because the questions were not predictable. On day 9, you can see the mean score dropped to 64%. Some questions that many found difficult on this day involved place value or fractions. These are areas of number knowledge we will continue to work on. Our mean score rebounded back to 71% on day 10.

Note: Maths Dictionary is great website for helping you remember how to use the words in bold on this page.