ORIGAMI

In February and March I decided to join an etwinning project about origami. The task is to make origami, make pictures of the things and post them on etwinning for other lands to guess. In the second step is showing the children origami things made by other kids in other countries and let them guess what they can see.

I did this project together with one class of 5th graders and two classes of 6th graders. We also made pictures of our origamis and I also let the photo club make some pictures. So I kind of involved more kids into this project.

Certificate of our project with the involved countries and schools.

Generally it was quite fun to see how are some kids able to work with their hands and fold paper according to the instructions, whereas some were quite lost even at the beginning - folding the paper in halves :) However they all managed to finish their origami at last.

Here are some pictures from how we were making origami animals and flowers:

So how about you, can you name our origami products? In case you are more interested and want to see more, visit our etwinning page.

Of course I let the children draw whatever they wanted on their origamis. 

When we made little frogs, the funny part was to make a competition involving the jumping frogs jump the furthest. It's so great when one can get the kids' attention :)

one~two~three~ACTION

Well, this week was a hard one for everybody. As a part of the Comenius project "Communication is an art" is my school obliged to make a film about communication. Possibly connected with exchanging students, the novel Gulliver's Travels and art. The class 8b had one week to make this film.

Finally we didn't make only one film, we split the kids into 4 groups of four to five students. Each group was led by a professional media person. Yes, I find this totally amazing, that here, in Saxony-Anhalt there's an opportunity to have media people come to your school and make a film based on your expectations. They don't make the film themselves. They provide technology, knowledge and assistance, the films are made by pupils. This institution called Medienanstalt is responsible for the broatcasting rules, laws and all different things. However a big thing they do is working with schools on different projects. Just to imagine how much they are wanted and how much schools and kids want to have media education, we had to apply for this week's assistance one and half years ago!!!

I am not yet allowed to spread what the films are about because they first need to be shown to our partner schools who are coming to visit us in April. Only then we can show the films. Nevertheless, I can say, there's a comedy among them, an action film and they all are interesting, funny and good. The most important thing is that the kids had fun, they wanted to do this and they learned without noticing it. They of course started with collecting the ideas for the film, writing the storyline, script, then recording the film and finally putting it together in Adobe Premiere. What I find great is that all had to participate on everything. All of them had to videotape, hold microphone, act and finally cut and do the rest. And from now on they will never ever watch films with the same eyes like before.

Here are some of the pictures I made during filming and the premiere, where we had a red carpet and five classes to watch :)

For more pictures and descriptions please wisit my gallery.

little 6th graders

My group of 6th graders was supposed to conduct a poll on the topic of mobile phones. The first tree weeks they didn't bring any results. Last week they brought something which for me looks more like their oservations connected with imagination. However, here are some of their results, I'll be more strict next time :)

Most of the grandparents use their mobile phones in emergency cases. However, there are two grand parents who use it more often, even for texting and playing games. The most frequent activity children in the 6th grade use mobiles for is playing games. The second one is texting. 


4 out of 5 children in the class are not allowed to use Internet on their mobiles, even if they are smartphones. Those, who are allowed, use it more times a day to keep in touch with friends (social networking),  or look up information on the web.

Dealing with this topic, kids learned how fast the technology of mobile phones is developing and when it all started. They also learned how the mobiles in past looked like, when the first iPhone came to Germany and how have the prices changed. The most interesting part for them was to learn, that the car phone in 1960s to 70s cost 15000 DM, while a VW Beetle cost just 5000 DM.

Christmas ☃ E-twinning

So the nicest season of the year is over but I still haven't uploaded anything about it.
I did several projects and so here they are:

☆ Firstly we did an E-twinning project with Slovakia, Czech, Poland, Turkey and Estonia. I was called Christmas in our country and the main goal was to describe habits, food, traditions in our countries using German language.

We chose to make ppt presentations since the 8th class was about to practice making them. Here are some of them:
Ein Tag beim Blankenburger Weihnachtsmarkt
Das Essen bei Weihnachten
Weihnachtsmarkt
Adventskalender
Adventszeit
Weihnachtsbaum


The Estonians also made their own nice blog with a lot of info and nice videos. Here you can find it and learn about their Christmas. Slovaks also made a presentation about Christmas in the east and Polish made a nice one too.

What I learnt here is that your expectations and ideas may differ a lot from your students'. :) However I we all express ourselves in different ways, I hope you enjoy them!


☆ With the 6th graders I did something about Christmas too. The thing was that I contacted a Slovak school, actually a teacher of German language in Slovakia and I offered her to exchange some postcards and posters about Christmas. Again, typical food, habits etc.
I was unlucky because she got ill and despite sending her a lot of materials she sent me only one postcards. Tomorrow I'm going to be with my class and I bet they will ask about the postcards from Slovakia, well I will show them one I have and probably give them sweets. I know, it's quite unpedagogical, but kids know how much time they spent doing something and they expect what was promised. No excuses.

So here are just some pictures of posters and "postcards" from them:

     

And this is how my room at school looks right now :) 

So if this wasn't enough, I have some more Christmas presentations done in the computer classes :)

Friday's photo club

I'm glad to have some photo fans at school, who love to meet me once a week, learn something new and make pictures, pitures & pictures!

I'm no photographer or proffessional, but this passion for taking pictures, evaluating them and looking at the good ones are common features that my students and I have. And if there are only a few tricks I can teach them, than I'm happy to do so.

So far we haven't done much, our topic for the beginning is composition. Yes, it's not only important to make pictures and pusch the button at the right time, but also find the best place to place youself or make as many shoots as possible. The first two topics for shooting were 'Christmas' and 'colorful'... And I still don't have much pictures to show, but I can do it with some :)

In the future I'd like to go through basic settings for camera, play with shutter, apperture, ISO and so. As well some basics of street photography, lomography, B&W, macro... and we'll see what else and to what extend.

I love this picture - it's Annica feeding animals and trying to get them out of their shelter and Rike making the best shot possible. As I can see, we can also learn to cooperate and help each other during these lessons...

AND you wouldn't believe how passionate can pupils be about learning when it's something different from everyday, when it's about themselves...EVEN AFTER THE NORMAL SCHOOL LESSONS.

These are pictures by Rike, who had in her mind "I have to follow the rule of the thirds, I have to think of composition, middle is not interesting in this case" :)

And I think she did well. Remember, these pictures are not ment to win shooting competition, they are not post processed and they are made by 14-year-olds.

Here, again, very nice pic of a typical German (also Scandinavian) Christmas decoration - the Herrnhuter Stern...

Happy to have managed to take a pic of some animals. Not straight but I think very nice job!










Right, I should capture the posters hanging at school, saying 'come to our photo club'... Even the head teacher was asking whether I or my mentor mad it. Well none of us. Kids who are interested. And who, again can become very passionate if you give them the idea and the chance to do what they like.