Saturday, November 22, 2008

Travelling in the Australian Outback

This week my class continued their "Are We There Yet?" journey into the Australian outback in northern Western Australia (WA) and headed into the Northern Territory (NT). I found this great YouTube video of a helicopter ride in the Bungle Bungles, so we bounced in our seats as we imagined flying through this amazing area!




We also watched this BBC video of looking for witchetty grubs and digging for honey ants. It tied in really nicely with the section of the book about Alice Springs. (Unfortunately, it has embedding disabled).

It was quite an artistic week with students designing their own "possible creepy creatures in Tunnel Creek" pictures, watercolour paintings of Uluru at different times throughout the day, and crayon sunsets with black silhouttes of boab trees.

We searched for some photos of the places we 'visited' and printed them out. Students photoshopped themselves with a friend into these places using old-fashioned cutting and pasting with real scissors and glue! They then made up a story about their adventure in this place. Some stories were very exciting with lots of problems along the way.

A couple of students' relatives have sent us postcards of the places where they live, so we are getting to find out about different places that way. One student recently travelled in QLD, so he brought along his photos to show the class as well. I love the way that the wider community gets involved with our learning and students explore the topic from their own experiences and interests.

Next week we head further north in NT to visit Kadadu, Darwin and a few other places along the way.

3 comments:

  1. We had Jessica Ahlberg come to visit our class and we made a podcast. Jessica is Janet and Allen's daughter.

    Jessica Ahlberg Podcast

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  3. Prue said
    http://mylifeasthegoodtwin.blogspot.com/
    Hi Penny,
    I meant to write a comment ages ago after you checked out the post I had written comparing my family holiday with "Are we there yet?". The work you are doing with your class is great. I would have loved it if I was in Year 1! I wrote a diary of my trip around Australia, and though it is written in the eloquent words of an 8 year old, if you are interested in me scanning some of it for you to check out and maybe use (perhaps!) you are welcome to it. I would say that I would be happy to visit your class, but I think it might be difficult due to our locations.

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