Brilliant Mask Making :-)

Well done Team Room 3!  I was very impressed with your Japanese mask making expertise.
Here are some of the marvellous creations.

Don't give up on your narrative about being whisked away to Japan -I will keep helping if you keep writing!
Sorry - I won't be back on Friday as I'm working somewhere else.
Write your day one experience up on your own blog then comment on my blog so I can go and read it. I will then add information about day two and what happened after the ninja attack!

During the night of our imprisonment...

You survived a shocking days events to find yourselves imprisoned in a massive Japanese castle.
As you slept uneasily upon your single tatami, you sensed creeping in the halls... then violence erupted!

What do you do!

Day One Fujiyama

Mr Woody arranged a troop carrying ex-aircraft plane to take us to Mount Fuji in Japan.
we experienced the flight, a landing on a wildeness airstrip, a trip overland in a troop carrying vehicle, entry to a majestic Japanese castle, a traditional greeting ceremony and being surrounded by tradional samurai warriors. It's almost as thought we have gone back in time...
After a delicious meal of traditional food and tea, we slept in separate rooms with shoji walls, tatami mat floors and uncomfortable wooden pillows.

You need to write up your day one experience with descriptive lanaguage, your feelings, reactions and predictions.











Look out for unexpected adventures on day two...

Room 3 Fujiyama trip

Your crazy billionaire reliever Mr Woody has kidnapped you and taken you to Japan on a survival field trip to practice Japanese, learn martial arts and survival skills.
You need to make a post on your blog stating what you will take to survive on a tramping trip. No modern electrical appliances will be useful and no modern weapons are allowed. You can take knives, hatchets, etc. No guns.
List your 12 items. Your pack is a freebie and you have to take a sleeping bag as one of your items.
Remember you need water, food, shelter, heat to survive in the outdoors. You need to be self sufficeient or working in pairs to cover all your needs.

Writing our story...

While writing Kakepuku catastrophe, we need to remember some of the rules and regulations of writing, [like using capital letters occasionallyl...mr woody!] as well as ideas to help make our writing less tedious to make an audience suffer through.

the internet being our friend, as it is, i have found official documents made by "the government" to support our understanding of what is required when we write properly...

Level 4b learning intentions:
[level 4b is the level we all want to achieve as a minimum for our reading and writing. many of you are already capable of this or more but reinforcement and revision is useful to help retain knowledge and skills.]

Audience awareness and purpose
Engages audience and sustains reader attention. Language use and writing style enhance the telling. The writer's "voice" may enter the text and invoke a reaction.

Content inclusion
Story includes comprehensive elements (i.e., orientation, complication, resolution, and sometimes coda). Clear focus on and development of specific events, characters, and settings.

Coherence: sequencing ideas and linking
Story element sequencing managed well (e.g., effective plot or development of events). Effective linking is evident through the use of some linking devices (e.g., conjunctions of time - afterwards, next, meanwhile), which make the story flow.

Language resources for achieving the purpose
May use language devices (e.g., figurative language) and descriptors (e.g., adverbials, adjectives) to engage the audience and give detail to and develop characters, actions, and settings. Purposeful use of dialogue (where included).

We will have to discuss this in class to understand it all. By trying to comprehend what is actually being said here and relating it to our writing, we will probably learn something about writing..and it will be a kind of reading lesson too! HOoray!

Let's edit this page together in class [under my login] and make new vocabulary a different colour. transfer these words to your word study list when you have identified them.

Digital Story Telling workshop

Our friend, Elaine ["Her Majesty"] Bliss, came to school to teach us about Digital Story telling. We watched Sasha's digital story called "The Dress", which is about her relationship to Mr Woody's beloved grandmother, Gwendoline Violet Tucker.

Qu. What aspects of her story were effective in drawing us into the story?

Elaine went on to outline for us the important elements of digital story telling. These apply to all our story telling:

1. Point of view - what understanding or realisation are you trying to communicate to your audience?
2. Dramatic question - the hook; something that draws in the audience
3. Emotional Content - love, fear, etc
4. Your Voice - you narrate and you make it personal
5. Economy - these are brief stories with a simple message
6. Personal story, risk taking and emotional safety - we must respect each other

Also, think of the story as a circle or loop - begin somewhere and bring it altogether at the end.

We will use these techniques to create a digital story to explain how we relate to Hamilton.

Everyone's story will be different.

speed writing

free association, speed writing is a way to warm up your brain for further more disciplined writing. sometimes people get stuck finding it difficult to start writing. what we did in class was an exercise, much like warming up before you enter a race.
not all of you would have enjoyed it at first, but could you make comments on how it was for you as a learning experience. i could tell that many of you enjoyed it. was it useful?
[this is where you can give feedback on what you do in class - have your say, share ideas, be interesting and constructive please]
:-)

[and yes, i know i am not using capitals - whoops]

Narratives and Room5

SO, you've just spent a whole term writing a wicked narrative based on your adventures on Kakepuku - now we've discovered Mr Woody might actually like poetry - so, can you help him to learn about the famous poets and the most renowned narrative poems?

Inchcape rock is one such poem - one group of expert reader Room5ians has begun to learn about literature circles - they may help guide us through the tricky task of unravelling some of the English speaking world's greatest writing....

http://www.schoollink.org/csd/pages/engl/narrativ.html lesson plans for narrative poems

[for mr woody and teachers - kids may look too]

what wikipedia says:

"Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story.

Narrative poetry is among the oldest, and perhaps the oldest, genre of poetry. Many scholars of Homer, from Quintus Smyrnaeus forward, have concluded that his tales of the Iliad and Odyssey were composed from compilations of shorter narrative poems that related individual episodes, and which were more suitable for an evening's entertainment."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_poetry

http://www.lancsngfl.ac.uk/curriculum/literacy/lit_site/html/fiction/narrative/index.htm

the link above has some of the famous narrative poems in it - one of them was read at my wedding to my darling beloved Sasha :-)

can you guess which one?

the following link has a lesson for us to do in class [or at home]

http://www.babinlearn.com/pdf%20files/Poetry/Narrative%20Poetry.pdf

have fun, young bards - you are the best!