Inferring Mood in Reading

 Through a research programme with Manaiakalani Year 7 and 8 classes, I am developing my understanding of teaching critical literacy skills for reading that can be used in writing. In this episode of Class OnAir, I am looking at how students can identify the mood in a story through inferring. As adults, we know we use clues from images, words and how people and situations are portrayed to us.

Just before this lesson, I was teaching students how to identify mood in their reading, using nouns and verbs to make connections. I was reminded this is called inference. When I mentioned inferring and guessing using keywords from the text, the light bulbs exploded. Check out the link to Inferring the Mood through Class onAir.

Sketching Koru Patterns to Pastel Koru Patterns

These 2 episodes for Class OnAir are a  series. Not something I usually do, but when I figured out both steps are vital for the piece of Art I wanted to share onAir. 

Even Year 7 and  8 students need time to practise and design. So that is the first episode encouraging students to practise. We don't get better at riding a bike by giving up. The same goes for all aspects of life, including art. So to get our best koru patterns, everyone had to practise.

The second episode is taking our design to the finished product. Some spectacular pieces made a great display for our community evening. In this episode, the students used a 'cool' colour starting with the dark shade, e.g. dark green, to outline their design (which is in a 2D shape that makes the border) and then the light shade to colour inside. Students were encouraged to overlap, have a piece missing from the border and if possible have relief or black koru (that worked its way into the colour pattern).

Enrich Math - Capacity

 Popcorn Capacity

What a great way to start a maths lesson. The students talked about capacity and predicted, guessing which container would hold more. They got to make the containers to verify their thinking. The best part according to the students was when I brought out the POPCORN! Check out this episode of Class onAir to see what happened.

What I like about using these tasks is I can engage a range of students with maths and then teach them the relevant skills they need to move to the next step, such as using formulas to work out the capacity on a container.