Tuesday 24 May 2016

We Are the Best Table

This afternoon students were challenged to come up with persuasive arguments for why their table is the best. Students were very enthusiastic and began brainstorming ideas straight away. Each team created a Google doc and shared it with their team so each person in the team could collaborate and contribute their ideas.










The presentations were very entertaining as students used all their skills of persuasion to convince the teacher that they were the best table. We had a rap, hyperbole, and some (outrageous) claims about the prowess of various group members. We had appeals to the value of creativity, academic smarts, sporting achievements, listening skills, teamwork and manners.

We had some table banging to emphasise points and some excellent verbal expression as students passionately presented their cases for excellence. I was very impressed with the many "sizzling starts" I heard as students applied the skills we've been learning about when presenting their oral persuasive arguments.


The best table is.......the one that met the assessment criteria best! Well argued boys.





Wednesday 18 May 2016

Global Maker Day

Yesterday we celebrated Global Maker day. We connected to schools all around Australia and the world for a design challenge. Our brief was that we had to create chairs for one of our characters - Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear or Goldilocks based on their needs. For example, Goldilocks is training for the Olympics, so she needs a comfy chair that she can relax in.

First, we got into groups of 3 and chose which person we would make a chair for. We made a plan of what we would make on a piece of paper. Then we prototyped it with cardboard. This was our original prototype. The groups had to bend and cut the cardboard to create their chair. This proved a bit of a challenge for many groups. There were many different styles in the room with some groups creating folding chairs and others creating desk chairs with one leg. This was most likely the most challenging stage of chair creation.

Then play-doh. At the beginning of this stage, everyone yelled “YAY! PLAY-DOH!!!” It certainly was a fun stage for many groups.

The fourth and final stage was creating our chairs out of pipe-cleaners, straws, toothpicks and tape. This stage was extremely messy, with straw bits, snapped toothpicks, pieces of pipe-cleaner and many other things littering the floor.

In each stage, we would have to work as a team and come up with ideas and what we needed to change from the last prototype. Then we would share our creations with the other schools.


We learnt from this that there are stages of design and prototyping we had to go through before could even make a real chair for our character and how this can relate to real life. At our school, there is a construction being built. It is an underground carpark and a Stage 3 learning centre. The teachers and principal thought about making this 3 years ago. They all came up with ideas and gave them to an architect. Then the architect went back and forth to teachers and parents for 3 years until they finally had their final prototype and only this year the have started to build.

The design challenge for Global Maker Day was certainly a highlight of our learning this year.

By Abby & Josie





Tuesday 10 May 2016

Mystery Skype - Mt Sommers New Zealand

Today Year 6 connected with a class in New Zealand to play a geography game of mystery skype.

Mystery Skype is a task that involves the entire class, each student has a role to fulfill, whether it’s the supervisor, greeter, answer, questioning, scribe, journalist, google mapper or globe hunter. Today we had to discover where in the world or in fact New Zealand the other class was and they did the same to us. It gave us the opportunity to see life from an others perspective hearing about their understanding of what life would be like growing up in Australia as well as hearing what life is like for them in New Zealand.


Mystery Skype is an exciting part of innovation hour, the part of the week where we experiment with our learning to discover new and exciting things. Mystery Skype has three skills needed if you want to win leadership depending on which role you have, teamwork with the group you are in and geography to know. It is essential to know how to read the maps, understand latitude and longitude and work with North, South, East and West.


Each role is an important one as we need to depend on each to succeed and each time we play a new game we have new roles. Google mappers are in charge of creating questions such as “is your country in the southern hemisphere?” These questions are based on the answers they have already been given and the maps that are looked at on “google maps.” The journalist is the person who writes the reflection or explains what we have done. 

Finally, the scribe writes the question that the mappers have given and the answers that have been given by the other school, they also write the questions and answers from the other school.

Mystery Skype lets us meet new people overseas as well as in Australia, it allows us to improve our knowledge of geography and how other schools in different countries work and it teaches us skills like teamwork and leadership.

By Hannah







Bread!!

This week Year 6 made bread as part of our Science unit to think about how micro-organisms can be used to make food. The bread mix was provided but students brought in the other equipment and we made the bread in our classroom. We had to mix the dough, knead it and leave it to rise. We then kneaded it again before taking the dough down the kitchens to be baked.




When the bread was ready the lovely teacher's aide Mrs Wood brought it up for us along with some butter and spreads. We had a feast! I did overhear several students say it's the best bread they've ever tasted. There's nothing like fresh bread!


Breakout

This post whilst delayed was an activity student's in Year 6 completed earlier this term. Breakout is a real world problem-solving activity where students use clues to break into a locked box to recover a prize.






Thursday 5 May 2016

Making Paper Cubes - Student-led Learning

Several students from Year 6 attended Maths Camp this week. One of the learning activites was how to fold and make a cube out of coloured paper. Alex F from 6H was very enthusiastic about this and volunteered to put together a document showing how to fold the sections including photos of each step (see below). Alex and Samuel, who also attended the camp then taught the class how to fold and make the cubes. They helped students and shared some of th pitfalls they'd encountered when making the cubes themselves. The students did a terrific job of explaining the process. The class was very engaged and had a lot of fun learning to make the cubes. Thanks boys for sharing your learning with us!












THE COOLEST CUBE

If you are stuck at any point come and see us




Step 1:  the paper corner to corner make sure it is on the white side.

(Repeat on other side)
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Step 2: fold opposite corners in.


(Repeat on other side)
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Step 3: now that you have three lines get the same triangle and fold it to the most outside lines.

(Repeat on other side)
Step 4: keep folding to get a trapezium.

(Repeat on other side)
Step 5: flip the paper
Step 6: this is a tricky one, fold the flat part into the middle

(Repeat on other side
Step 7: fold remaining triangles in.

(Repeat on other side)
Step 8: fold into a parallelogram.
Step 9: get triangles on the side and tuck under the trapezium.

(Repeat on other side

MAKE 6 THEN COME OUT TO US. :)