Rockstar’s 3-Way Conference In Year 2

Rockstar and his 3-way conference booklet

3-way Conference is the student-led activity where parents come in to participate in some class activities with their child, and sit in on a discussion led by the child on his/her progress and learning targets. (Around the school as usual however, there’ll also be a lot of other activities going on, in the name of Let’s Make Sure You Make The Most Of The Hour You Had To Take Off Work To Come In.)

For us, our “3-Way Conference Event” began by dropping off something for the Year 6’s donation drive which is part of their “Take Action” learning unit:

Just love how the Year 6 collections take up a huge prominent area in front of the school, you can see the pile literally getting bigger and bigger…

It’s a nice reminder of how much everyone is contributing as a school… The actual pile stretches for substantially longer than this frame, and interestingly there are kids of all ages running around, either waiting for their siblings or well, are in between their conference turns, and I don’t ever see anyone messing with the huge pile of (surely tantalizing) toys and etc that are meant for the various donation drives. Occasionally I see kids run up to it and look curiously, but no taking stuff and messing with it…

Here’s some of the posters we happened to see:

I think this one was HK Cage Home or Homelessness awareness

…..And then it was time for Rockstar’s conference slot. There are laptops set up for us to play some of the school Virtual Learning Environment games, a sketching station, and all around the classroom as part of the most recent learning unit about how things change, there’s exhibits of old vs new things – boats, phones, buildings, cameras, and some of the kids’ inputs on materials, how things are made, and how what they are used for have changed over the years.

This one was Rockstar’s.. (Kings found that black telephone for him to bring in from his office)

Kings had been away, and I abruptly realized I was supposed to send printed out pictures by the next day, for when they did the project.. at 7.30pm the night before. So I googled… Rockstar drew those himself since well, they are plain black marker diagrams.. (If you ever see me put up a colorful picture of a unicorn or some happy sunny flowery garden scene you know that’s either fake or he’s going through…… a strange phase :D)… that tiny picture of an old phone I actually cut from Rockstar’s new I Wonder Why book ok, plus my iPhone 5 Chinese instructions (since I can’t read them) so he could use the picture, but I think in the end he forgot the iPhone picture because he was too busy with the rest (darn and I dug high and low looking for a picture he could bring in, should’ve just zzzzz..)

It was a pleasant surprise he could write that much in the sitting though, especially as they had to write drafts beforehand so they technically wrote double what was on their exhibits; I thought he was supposed to present in class, and knew he could say the stuff, but didn’t know how much he could get down on paper…

Rockstar wrote, “When you use an old phone, you have to call the operator to connect the right phone number! When (the phones) got newer, you could connect phone numbers with computers! You also had to use wires! For old phones, the sound travels by electric current so they need wires. The diaphragm acts as an eardrum! No matter how old or new they are, (phones) do the same thing! New phones even have other uses today with lots of Apps! For old phones as the electric(ity) travels, this magnetizes the electromagnet and causes sound.

New phones are on radio waves! No matter how old or new phones must have transmitters and receivers!” And then he says he ran out of space so he squeezed another sentence above: “Satellites help us in apps like GPS and HK (Weather) Observatory.”

Anyway I didn’t know he could write that much (I knew he could say it, draw the diagrams, just not write that fast)… Definitely happy because I lose a lot of my own train of thought when I write instead of type or speak <sheepish>

(His learning target btw, was… paragraphing! Yes I shall put an exclamation mark :))

This is another one among the many pages and different diaries and math books:

Rockstar says that was from a Hakka cultural museum trip, which I was already pretty psyched about, but what really cracked me up was the picture he drew. According to him, that’s a pic of when he and his friends observed the old, heavy wooden lunch boxes from a time before everything was plastic and with Disney Princesses or Angry Birds on them:

And so among Rockstar and Good Friend (Rockstar is of course the shortest one in the pic) are also “Speechless Friend” and “Confused Or Shocked Friend” (No plastic Disney Princess lunch boxes, geddit? 😀 Rockstar himself came back that day going on and on about how people actually made wooden lunch boxes but that they were crazy heavy, and how could people carry them in schoolbags etc back in the day…)

Another thing I was looking forward to finding out more about was………. how Minecraft is used in Rockstar’s school. Rockstar obviously looooves technology (and I don’t mean Xbox) and had been on and on about getting to play Minecraft in school. Anything Rockstar is that enthusiastic about, I’m keen to exploit have as a teaching tool, because I believe strongly in ways to make learning less “painful” – but no less effective. And so I went looking for more information about this after not being able to find that much detail from simply googling the game.

It was then further explained to me how in year 2 they are using it to explore maths concepts such as pattern, symmetry and number sequences (for e.g. times tables). “…..giving the children the ability to play with these concepts using blocks… has expanded their understanding of place value as they can see the difference between 10 and 100, and how a 1000 is a really big number.”

pic from raws.wordpress.com (I forgot to take a pic of the printed out one in Rockstar’s schoolbook – this was as close as I could find re the towers)

In year 3 they get to build their own town – during which they think about what buildings a town needs (hospitals, schools, fire stations etc I guess), where they should be placed within the town and what materials to build them from.

(I’m guessing something like this? – pic from minecraft.rvdbrg.com)

For older kids in the school Minecraft Club, they then learn things like how to work together to build a functioning community, why that’s important, why people have jobs, and the environmental impact of building a town…. Hearing that makes me like this more and more, because especially for a child who loves “video games” (he means Minecraft – he doesn’t get Mario Bros or etc) and thinks Minecraft is “cool,” it would really make a lesson stick…

And on to….. the 2014 Kennedy School Art Exhibition and Auction also going on in the hall that day:

The ole’ school hall actually looks like one of those trendy art galleries! (And that’s Sting’s guitar on auction)

Rockstar showing me one of his favorites, “Dance of the Pink Dolphins” by one of the year 5 classes

(That Pink Dolphin piece btw, is up to HKD 5,200 bid at press time on the Kennedy School main website; bidding is open until this 27 March 4pm I think… In the background are some of the large chalk drawings done by the Music department, inspired by Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.)

This one of the paintings – pic from kennedy.edu.hk under PTA events

And then I think each class each year would put together a composite painting (which was pretty cool, I’d never seen this idea before…)

So for e.g. this is what each of the Year 2 classes’ collage art pieces were about – this is from the information booklets available outside the school hall where they were having the exhibition that day

Each of the class paintings are made up of squares done by each child  in the class and then framed together to form the bigger picture

This is by the Chinese Department, featuring the different cultural aspects and paper-cutting etc art techniques…

(Quite regretted I missed taking a proper picture of the “Blocksticks” one (top right) because the picture in the catalogue really doesn’t do it justice, it’s actually a 3-D made of little sticks, but we still had Chinese 3-way conference that we hadn’t done yet, and we climbed several flights of stairs back and forth to find the place, go back and look at the art exhibits, and then leave again for the actual meeting, just to make sure I actually knew where to go so we wouldn’t be late…)

…And then I went to the school website and found it! (Note to self: ask Rockstar to read that)

…..and then it was off to Chinese 3-way Conference and the Funzone session I promised Rockstar (he’s not a big Disneyland fan).

The End.