Reflection

Today is my last day of Enrich and we had to do a reflection where we had to answer some questions. This is my reflection.

Math talent development

Today at talent development we have started making a lego minifigure size band rotunda because the SIT building is getting demolished and they can't cut pieces for us for our puppet showed sized model. We are making our smaller ones in groups of 1, 2 or 3. I am in a group of three with Kieran and Wilson. As you can see we are not done.

 We are making them out of card, pipe-cleaners, straws and ice-block sticks. We made a huge mess!

We divided all of the real measurements by 70 to get our model measurements.

Maths talent development

Today at talent development we got our measurements from 2 weeks ago and we scaled them down to make our band rotunda (which is now going to be a puppet stage). The equations that we had to do were either divided by 8 or times 0.125.

Two stars and a wish

Today is the last day of Enrich for term three.
These are my two stars and a wish.

My first star is Story-telling talent development with Katie. It was AWESOME!

My second star is Where In The World. These are like the Henry Tuatara Challenge except different people like Bruce C Gull.

My wish is to have more ICT workshops next term.

Hi Jack.
I am so impressed with how well you have been working throughout the term on your writing.  Your narrative story has a clear beginning, middle and end and is full of action along the way!  It is great to see you incorporate your enjoyment of computers into your story.  I particularly like the way you have used a lot of computer jargon within your story.  Your effort using Garageband is fantastic - you have recorded your voice clearly, and used a variety of vocal changes and sound effects to add more depth to your story.  Well done Jack!
Katie.

Story-telling talent development

Today at Talent Development we started our real GarageBand/KidPix projects. I did mine on GarageBand. I had to record my voice for the whole thing which is 3 minutes and 5 seconds long. It was very hard to make because I did sound effects as well. It was very fun and I still have to finish it off and show Katie.

P4C

Today as one of my workshops I did P4C. At P4C our question was 'are impossible things possible?' We started by seeing each others answers with no talk. Darryn then asked if genies were real. I said yes because there could be another world that we don't know about. Another kid then started a HUGE argument about it but in the end Darryn won and we carried on. After asking some yes/no questions we learnt about contradictions. We then settled with the answer that everything is possible except contradictions. In the end this was a good P4C session                  

Story-telling talent development

Today at Talent Development I finished up writing my story(again)and then we learnt about GarageBand. GarageBand is a computer program that lets you record your voice and then you can modify your voice in any way you want. You can also add pictures and if you do they will play as you listen so it is a bit like a movie. I have had fun playing around with GarageBand and I am ready to make my soundtrack for my animation.Download for Mac computer. Sorry, no download for Windows.

Story-telling talent development

This week at talent development I finished writing my story on Pages, all I had to do is fix up the weak spots in my story like adding detail and more explanation to my story. I am very proud of my finished project and can't wait to start animating!

What am I?

Today I made a 'What Am I?' Keynote. These are Keynotes that you give clues and extreme close up pictures of an object. You have to try to guess what the object is and the clues can help you. My one was about a lego brick.

Hi Jack.
You had a great session during our writing talent development this morning.  You have chosen to work independently and you settled into the planning task well.  Your ideas are well sequenced and easy to follow.  I look forward to you unpacking your planning and getting your writing underway in the next week.  It was great to see you enjoying yourself at the drama workshop this afternoon.  You participated in all the activities, which was great to see.
Katie.

Story-telling talent development

Last week we chose our talent development and I chose story-telling. We are going to film or animate our story and enter it into the MADE awards. The MADE Awards are movies that have been made by schools all over New Zealand. My movie is about an evil computer download that takes over all of the computers at Enrich and traps everyone inside the building. It is going to be an animation but I haven't started animating yet.

Henry Tuatara challenge

Today we got an email with a link to a Keynote called "Where in the world". In this Keynote we had to read clues and then give the country/city that it is referring to. Some of the places were Denmark, Oslo, Wellington and Japan. It was hard but we were allowed the Internet to find out the answers.

Teacher Comment

Jack.

You have had a great term at Enrich.  You have accepted challenges and done your best to complete given tasks.  Robotics pushed you to think outside the square, as programming them took both time and patience.  I have enjoyed reading your regular blog posts.  They are informative and interesting, and show the enjoyment you are getting from Enrich.  You are polite and you confidence is beginning to grow, which is showing through more interaction with other students.  Keep up the awesome work for Term 3.

Katie.

Two stars and a wish

Today is the last day of enrich for the term and we have to write our two stars and a wish. Our stars are things that we are proud of or things that we enjoyed. Our wish is what we want to happen next term. My first star is ICT talent development where we did Alice, Scratch and Lego Mindstorms because it was really fun doing it and I love ICT. My second star is Current Affairs because I did them most weeks and they were something to do in my spare time. My wish is to find out about some of the computer applications we don't use like Sketchup and I Can Animate.

ICT talent development

Today at talent development we started to make a tutorial about Scratch or Alice. I did an Alice one about events and methods. It showed you how to make a cowboy scene and the cowboy shoots the sheriff. You can also walk around. We used Activinspire screen recorder to record us doing the thing that we were doing our tutorial about.

ICT talent development

Today we got to programme our robots. We made a program on the computer and then downloaded it to the robot. My favourite program was follow a line. We had a special mat covered with lines and we made the robot follow them. Here is a link to a website about the robots.http://www.nxtprograms.com/

ICT talent development

Today at Talent Development we built our robots. The robot we were building was the most basic one. The people in my group were Miro, Caleb and I. We added most or all of the sensors including laser light and sight. Here are some pictures of the robot that my group made.

Gifted Awareness Week

This week is Gifted Awareness Week and we have to write a blog post about being gifted.  Gifted Awareness week is about being aware of gifted children that go to places like Enrich.  Being gifted doesn't mean that you're the best at everything.  It only means that you are better than others in some areas.  Areas that I'm best at are: spelling, reading and ICT.  People are lucky that they are gifted because they get to go to places like Enrich.  These places are good because you get to be around people that are like you.

ICT talent development

Today we watched YouTube tutorials for Scratch.  We watched number 2 and 3.  Number 2 told us how to animate a sprite and number 3 told us how to add sound and make it play.  We made a Scratch using all of these skills.  Here are some links to the tutorials.  Tutorial 3- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAHGERpVCo&feature= Tutorial 2- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A_fxYik4Qw&feature=related

ICT talent development

Today I did talent development with Alana and this time we finished off our Alice worlds and watched a scratch tutorial on YouTube and it told us how to create a sprite (character/object), and how to make it have different costumes.  If you think this sounds like fun, follow these links and download them.  There is also a link to the scratch tutorial and some screenshots of my sprite and my Alice world.
http://www.alice.org/-Alice
http://scratch.mit.edu/-Scratch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi9ooZcBBWg&feature+related

Renzulli Giftedness Chart

This morning at Enrich, we did a workshop about Renzulli's giftedness chart.  It is a diagram about giftedness and if a person is gifted or not.  It has three circles all linked together and each circle has something that Renzulli thinks you need to be gifted.  These things are: above average ability, task commitment and creativity.  We read some examples of different people and had to decide if they were gifted or not  For example:  Tim loved making designs for go-karts and he could measure and work out ratios easily. But when he tried to create his go-karts he gave up halfway.  Is Tim gifted?  If you think you know the answer, please comment on this post.  You can look at the diagram for clues.

Talent Development

Yesterday we got to choose what talent development topic we wanted.  The choices were out of ICT, Art or Nature Science.  I chose ICT.  For ICT we looked at programming computer programmes like Alice, Scratch and LEGO Mindstorms.  We watched a video about each one and said what we know and what we don't know about each one.  Alice and Scratch are computer programs but Mindstorms is LEGO.  In Mindstorms you create a Lego robot with pieces that allow your robot to use their five senses. You can make them do really cool things such as sorting out different colours.

Keynote with Darryn

Today I did a keynote workshop with Darryn.  At the workshop we learned how to use keynote.  Keynote is a computer programme that is used to create slideshows for presentations.  We have to learn how to use it because we will have to use it to present our ideas for passion projects.  We learned how to add pictures, text and new slides to a keynote. Here is an example of a practice Keynote presentation that I did at the workshop.

Creating a speed thinking challenge task

At the start of the year we did a speed thinking challenge.A speed thinking challenge is when you choose a pair and you do a set of challenges in 5 minutes.But today we got to create our own challenge.My one is about star wars characters.You have to guess who the characters are.Comment on this post if you know who they are.These are just some examples of my speed challenge.

7/4/11

Today for the co-operative game we played sardines. Sardines is a game kind of like hide and seek except one person hides and the other people have to find that person. If someone finds him/her they have to hide with them without telling anyone and it carries on until one person is left and they get to hide for next time. Then I did current affairs. It was about foreign fishermen fishing in NZ waters and getting treated cruelly. The website of the week was national geographic KIDS. It is a good website and there are good games on it. After lunch I did P4C again. This time we were talking about 'can we lie to ourselves?'. I Always thought we could but Darryn kept putting up an argument. You can't lie to yourself because you know it isn't true but you can lie to other people and they know it is true. If you want to let me know what you think, just comment on this post. Then I did rebuses and went home.

31/3/11

Today we played seaweed for the co-operative game. It wasn't the best game but it was still fun. Today I did P4C and Interactions for my workshops. At P4C we were talking about why we get rewards throughout the year at school and a big reward at the end of the year whilst we only get a big reward at the end of the year at Enrich. At interactions we made a mind-map about people to people interactions. I also did Current affairs, it was about Casey Heynes, a boy who fought back against a bully and another girl who got bullied at school and ended up knocked out and was bleeding out her ears.

24/03/11

Today we played a co-operative game where we were in three teams and we had to do an obstacle course. It was fun.

The workshops I went to today were moments in history and multiple intelligences.In history we were talking about why New Zealand is nuclear free and we made a comic life about the things we had learnt.    In multiple intelligences we talked about our intelligences and habits of mind.

Current affairs was a story of two people being rescued from a ruined building in Japan where the tsunami was.

First post ever!10/3/11

Wow, my first post ever! Today we played a game of rob the nest. Rob the nest is a game where you have your own nest/hoop for your team.Then you have to steal objects from the opposing team's nests. After that we started our flexible timetable. We could do affective domain or current affairs. We could also do some workshops including blogging, emailing, hot writing, art-still life, P4C(philosophy 4 children) and questioning. Affective domain was a survey about yourself and current affairs was about the earthquake.