Weekly Writing Mysteries Term One

I cannot believe I forgot to post this at the end of Term One. I wrote a reflection for James about Writing in a Google form that I probably should've posted on here too. It's floating around somewhere...

The weekly writing mysteries were an initiative that I came up with to improve engagement and achievement in writing. I collaborated with staff to organise weekly mysteries in the school for the students to experience and write about it. Here is a summary of them!

DINOSAURS

Dinosaur activities....

-        Footprints on the tennis courts over a course of a few days. Add more each day.

-        Eggs in the sandpit

-        Use an app to take a photo of dinosaur in school grounds

-        Eggs hatch. Baby dinosaurs inside.

METEORS

Meteor activities...

-        Meteors land on school grounds somewhere for students to discover

-        Collect swabs/samples and put in test tubes to be sent away for testing.

-        Forge a letter from Massey University with test results. 

-        Fire Snake experiment. We pretended to test the ‘ash’ for this experiment. 

-        https://food-hacks.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-fire-snake-from-sugar-baking-soda-0164401/

-        If you can get a real scientist/geologist in to talk to the kids that would be great. The guy we got was amazing.

ALIEN ABDUCTION

Alien abduction activities......

-        Teacher abducted with clues left to imply it was aliens. Clues might include slime or silly string trail, a ransom note, things the teacher left behind.

-        Police Interview- Get a police officer to interview students. I made contact through our Police Education officer who does the DARE and Kia Kaha programmes etc..

-        Get someone to dress up in an alien suit and take photos of the alien doing things all around the school. Eg. Eating toast in the staff room, playing on the playground, climbing trees, reading a book in the library etc. I would suggest using a polaroid camera and leaving the photos lying around for kids to find.

ALIEN SPACESHIP LANDING

Alien landing activities......

-        Use an app to take a photo of a flying saucer above the school.

-        Fake news article of UFO sightings. There was an online newspaper creation app that I used.

-        Crop circles- they are actually surprisingly easy to do if it’s not during a thunderstorm.