What a great first day back we had!

This term our learning is focused around the concept of IDENTITY and CULTURE.

Who am I? Who are we?

Today, it was important that we built relationships with each other and that is exactly what we did. All while having fun learning.

We looked at a small part of identity.  Through our names.  Identifying: How are we the same and different?

We played name bingo finding others who meet the criteria.  Some of the skills we used were: communication, spelling knowledge, reading, thinking, and keeping to a timeframe.

We were only aloud to use each persons name once.  We had to really think who was the best person to ask for each question.

Also, as part of this activity we had to estimate how long it would take us to get BINGO.  We discussed what it means to estimate.  We all made our estimations and did a tally chart to record these.

Allisa put the timer on our highest estimate which was 20 minutes and it started counting down.  We stopped the timer when the first person got BINGO.  The timer was on 7 minutes.

From this information we worked out how long it took us to do the task.  We talked about family of facts and what strategies we used to work out our answer.

Only 1 person estimated correctly.  Well done Jacob.  The rest of us were pretty close though.

Then we had to think about how our names can show how we are the same and different. Here are our thoughts....

We are the same because.....

• We all have letters in our names
• We all have a vowel in our name
• We all have a first name and surname
• Our names all start with a capital letter
• We all have consonants in our names

We are different because......

• We all have different letters in both of our names
• Our names have different lengths
• Our names might start and end with different letters

We then did some SPELLING.  We thought about the long vowel sounds in our names.  We had a competition to identify how many different ways  long vowel sounds were written in our names.  We shared our thinking about the different ways we can write the long vowel sounds.  

At the end of the day we did some more team building activities.

If we are working in a group - What do you need to do in order to be successful?  Setting expectations for group work.

These were our thoughts:

We worked on two tasks:

The first was to work as a team to build a house of cards.

The next challenge was to work as a team to solve a cup challenge.

Cup challenge:

We had 6 cups, 1 rubber band with 4 strings attached.

Each person had to hold on to one piece of the string and working together they had to manipulate the rubber band to grasp and move the cups.

To start they had to make this structure.

Then as a team they needed to move the cups from this structure to make a pyramid with two cups on the bottom and one on the top.  Experts had to make a pyramid with three cups on the bottom, then 2 cups and one on the top.

                                                

We had many great successes.

How did the day go?

This is what we thought.

It was.......

          fun                      it challenged us                                             easy to think of ideas              cool                tricky

we worked with people we might not have known before

The skills we thought we used were:  team work, communicating, thinking, practice, problem solving.

We decided we weren't that successful at the card activity.  So the challenge is to have another go tomorrow.  We decided it might be good to research how to make card houses first.