Explorer Project & Rocket Writing

Written by Hassan Bakir & Ayaan Taherani

Photos by Ali Hussein & Adam Zayat

The 3/4s have set off to do a project about their favourite world explorer on their computers. Personally, I think that this was the best thing we have done so far this year. We had to include their personal facts, their lifetime, the reasons why they are famous and some maps and pictures. Some of the explorers that we chose were Vasco de Gama, Abel Tasman, James Cook, Zheng He, Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo and others.

This is a good project for the students to learn about different explorers. It’s also great to learn how to use iMovie and iBooks Author, so they are able to make movies and books.

I spoke with Ali and asked him a few questions about the project. Ali said, “The explorer project is really fun to do and my explorer is James Cook. He said, “I chose iMovie because I like it more.”

Every Monday in the 3/4 area we have been doing Rocket Writing. In Rocket Writing you have a sentence starter that the teachers give you and you have to use the sentence starter to begin your story. When you have done your story then you have to type it up on your laptop.

These are the sentence starters that we have used. “I found one millon dollars...”, “I looked up...” “I looked in the box...” and “I put the key in the lock...”     

  

 

Rocket writing teaches us to use better punctuation such as capital letters and full stops. I spoke to Najma, a student in the area, and his opinion was that rocket writing was fun and that it improves your grammar, spelling, handwriting and your thinking.