Vietnam News!

As part of our HSIE Unit on Vietnam, students worked in Collaborative Clusters to bring us BREAKING NEWS from Vietnam.

Each group had to present information on the following…

  • Current Events
  • Clothing
  • Food
  • Sport
  • Weather

They could also included any other interesting information which they thought would be relevant for the class to know about Vietnam.

Here are their presentations…

Working with Fractions and Decimals

6L have spent the last 5 weeks working on Fractions and Decimals.

We conducted an assessment last Friday and it indicated that the majority of students have all improved from their initial Diagnostic Assessment at the beginning of the unit, however, there were still some gaps in understanding.

Today I set up 6 stations around the room which covered the following topics:

  • Equivalent Fractions
  • Simplifying Fractions
  • Adding and Subtracting Fractions with Different Denominators
  • Multiplying Fractions
  • Working with Percentages
  • Extension – Mathematical Problem Solving

The students were able to freely move around the class and work on the area of Fractions which they felt needed attention.

Tomorrow we will have another assessment to see if they have improved…

Measuring Length

6L currently has a practicum student working on class.

His name is Mr Boyd-Jones.

Today he took us all outside to look at measuring lengths greater than a metre.  Some tasks required us to use our 30cm rulers and we figured out pretty quickly that there must be a better option!  Thankfully he had some trundle wheels on hand.  That made measuring the perimeter of a basketball court much easier.

Here are some photos and videos of the students investigating measuring length:

Once we got back to class the students used the Distance Measuring Tool in Google Maps to check their results against the satellite images of the College grounds:

Haiku Poems

Haiku is a a form of Japanese poetry.  It often centers around nature.

Haiku poems don’t rhyme; they follow a pattern.  The pattern of haiku is the following:

Line 1: 5 syllables

Line 2: 7 syllables

Line 3: 5 syllables

Here are some haiku poems from the students:

Water through the rocks
Rain sliding through the big leaves
Clouds cover the big, blue sky
Jordan

Cold air blowing soft
Making the trees move slowly
Puts goose bumps on me
Michelle

Calming, deep blue waves
Glinting in the summer sun
Crashing on the beach
Christopher

Light comes this morning
The sun is in the blue sky
Day is here at last
Jack

Tearing through the sky
Lighting up the midnight air
Clouds rumble with awe
Jade

Vietnam Open Research Task

Teachers always have to be ready to think on their feet and make adjustments through the day when things don’t work out as they had planned.

Upon arriving to school this morning, I discovered that 12 students were away (some sick, some at the Zone Athletics Carnival).

What was I going to do?  I could continue with my normal teaching program, but half the class would miss out and I would probably need to revise it.

I decided that this would be a great opportunity to give the students an open task to research some of the questions that they had about Vietnam when we introduced the unit a couple of weeks ago.  This was their chance to get some answers to some of the things they were wondering about.

Their task was simple…

  1. Discuss with their Collaborative Cluster an aspect of Vietnam they would like to investigate
  2. Spend the morning researching information and put together a Prezi to present their findings to the class at the end of the day

They were able to use Britannica Online and Oddizzi to find information.

The groups quickly got to work and I overheard outstanding discussions from the students as they investigated different aspects of Vietnam.

They were able to collaborate and share information or good websites that they found using TitanPad.  This site also has a chat feature which allowed students to send instant messages to other groups to ask questions or clarify understanding.

Here are some photos and a video of the students intently engaged in their task…

Building Bridges

engineering-folded-paper-bridge_pg_Our next experiment for Science was investigating which shapes provide the most structural support when holding a weight over a gap.

We brainstormed some different options for changing the shape of an A4 piece of paper to achieve more structural integrity.

The options we came up with were:

  • Roll it into a cylinder
  • Fold it into a triangular prism
  • Fold it into a cube (some groups later found that this meant it was too short to span the gap…)

Once the decision was made on the shapes the students then tested the bridges to see which provided the greatest support (measured by adding glue sticks to the bridge.