Level Up: Preparing for Challenges in Learning and Life

It's an exciting time of year for our high potential students. The Australian STEM Video Game Challenge is now in the judging stages, the Australian Mathematics Competition was held earlier this week, Round 2 of The ASX Schools Sharemarket Game starts next week, and the Maths Olympiad and The Tournament of Minds are well underway. In addition to these, my school also runs a Writing Experience/Competition and a Poetry Recitation Competition. 

Opportunities like these push students outside their comfort zone and help them discover that growth comes from facing challenges head-on. This is exactly what we want for them. 

But pause for a moment. Remember the last time you faced a challenge - the kind that made you wonder if you were out of your depth. That moment of uncertainty. That fear that you might not succeed. As educators, we are quick to cheer our students into the unknown, yet we can feel the same tremble when we're the ones stepping forward. Growth is hard, and sometimes hurts. So how we can better prepare both ourselves and our students to meet those challenges? 

Safe and Supportive Environment

We start by fostering a safe and supportive environment. One where all ideas are valued, errors are stepping stones, and that it's okay to say, "I don't understand." We help each other when we struggle, and  celebrate  questions that deepen our understanding. 

When we feel safe and supported, we are more willing to take the risks that lead to growth.

Motivation

We are not all motivated by the same things. Some students thrive on competition, others would rather avoid it. 

In 2024, I worked with a student on his passion project, creating a game for The Australian STEM Video Game Challenge. He lost interest after a month, claiming he didn't like competitions. All that changed however, when he went to PAX and saw what winning looked like: tickets to PAX and a hoodie featuring the winning game. He had found his motivation. I have never seen him so committed to anything before. We pushed through the tough days, where the trouble shooting seemed to go nowhere, and he learned far more than coding - time management, resilience, persistence. By the time he was done, his game was impressive and the complexity of the code blew me away. I was so proud of him when he pressed the "submit" button. For him, it was tickets and a hoodie. For me, it's personal growth. What is it for you?

If we are going to commit to something, it needs to have personal meaning for us. 

Understanding "How to Play"

A lot of learning happens the first time you try something new. This is true for us as much as for our students. In my first year with The Tournament of Minds, I read the instruction manual cover to cover, but it just didn't click until I actually saw it in action. I leaned on the advice of those who had done it before.

When I judged the Spontaneous Challenge in my second year, I saw how teams could work effectively to develop their responses. Additionally, when one of our STEM teams progressed to the state and then international finals, I could identify the skills that students needed in order to succeed: STEM knowledge, teamwork, and time management - all without teacher intervention.

When we understand the game, the rules, and what success looks like, we can focus on what matters most.

Practice

Once we know what's required, we need to practise the skills. For The Maths Olympiad and The Australian Mathematics Competition, I've found that spaced practice at home builds both familiarity with question types, and capacity for problem-solving. When students can grapple with questions without the pressure to perform, they develop strategies to calm their fears and to piece together a solution step by step. In class, sharing different solutions shows there's more than one way to answer, which frees students to find the process that works for them. 

When we have spaced practice to develop skills without performance pressure, we feel more confident and prepared when the moment comes.

Opportunities to Iterate

In the rush of the school year, we often skip the chance to iterate. One thing I love about the ASX Schools Sharemarket Game is that there are two rounds each year.

In the first round, students often work in small groups, just getting a feel for the market. By the second round, they are ready to race, sometimes even doing their research in advance. This year, when my students reflected on their experience, everyone wanted to return for Round 2. Their first attempt wasn't the end, but rather the starting point.

When we have opportunities to iterate, our errors become the launch pad to our success.

I'm sure this list is not exhaustive, but these are the things that stand out to me as I watch my students and reflect on the way I tackle challenges. The truth is, whether it's a STEM competition or a career step, the principles are the same: find safety, spark motivation, learn the rules, practise with purpose and try again.

What would you add?

Enjoying the Garden

Just thought I'd share a couple of ideas I've tried to make the garden fun for my little guy.

Dinosaur Garden

And a dinosaur!

At the preschool we have a fairy garden for our students to play in. Bouncing on from this idea I decided to make a dinosaur garden at our house. It is a herb and veggie garden in a planter box. My little guy chose which seeds to plant and where to plant them. We then watered them and have been watching them grow. A week ago the dinosaurs moved in. I imagined that my little guy would move the dinosaurs around and make roaring noises, but that hasn't happened yet. He does, however, take care of the garden - watering it regularly and noticing the changes.

Veggie patch
We also have a larger veggie patch where we have enjoyed growing and harvesting snow peas, beans, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, corn (our favorite), silver beet, tomatoes, basil, tarragon, garlic, onion, lettuce, and broccoli.

Berries
We have two strawberry patches, some raspberries and three blueberry bushes. My little guy enjoys finding, picking and devouring the fruits.

Sunflowers
My little guy found sunflower seeds at the shops and wanted to get them for our garden. As they were only $1 I figured we could give it a go. It was exciting to watch the flower head grow and then close in. When the birds started eating the seeds we cut the head off and looked at the seeds together before husking and eating them.

Seeds
We've also collected and scattered seeds from other ants including coriander, parsley and marigolds.

Tech Tips Tuesday

This Week's Tip - Experience the World Without Leaving the Classroom

Today I would like to share with you another great resource for educational videos and photographs. Explore has three main goals:

• to champion the selfless acts of others
• to create a portal into the soul of humanity, and
• to inspire lifelong learning

The videos are short and captivating. They shed light on life beyond the classroom walls and explore the experiences of people around the world. These snapshots spark interest and lead to further questions about the world and its people.

The resources on this site are categorised both by topic and by country, making it easy to filter for the materials you need. As long as they're not blocked at my school, I can see myself using these with students during those transition periods while I wait for students to pack up and come to the floor for the next activity.

They would also fit nicely into units of work on culture, animals, the environment, and music.

Friday Fun - 30/10/09

I know that I skipped last week. Sorry to those of you who were hanging out for an update. I just got really bogged down again with all the things I need to get done. I am so very, almost finished with my Uni studies, and then I'll be ready to concentrate...on reports!

So, that said, this week I will give you a bit of fun from both weeks!

Show-Boating Show-Offs
We have been learning about rhythm patterns and using body percussion and basic percussion instruments. We learnt a Welsh lullaby last week and a simple song called "Jelly on a Plate" this week. Students have been playing ostinato (repeated rhythm patterns) along to the music on the CD.

Decimals
In Maths we have been working with decimals in the form of money and temperature. Students have been learning to round numbers and order them from least to greatest. They have also been exploring decimals using MAB.

Spelling
We have had an extra boost in an attempt to improve students' spelling. We are encouraging students to use dictionaries to check their spelling as they write. We are also using a number of websites to build word knowledge and an understanding of word origins. We found it interesting this week to discover that "astronaut" comes from "astron" meaning star and "nautes" meaning sailor. A great website to use for this is the Online Etymology Dictionary. Students have also been using a few sites to practice their spelling words. The hot favourite at the moment is Spelling City.

Pumpkin Patch
Our school is currently involved in a Pumpkin Growing Competition. This week we planted our seeds in the Sunlight Centre. Each month we will photograph and weigh our pumpkin to see its progress.

Band Performance
We have been lucky enough to have had lots of band performances in recent weeks. We had a Combined Year 5 band concert at our school last week and The Junior Concert Band performance this week. Our very own Fife and Drummers were at a Combined Performance this week as well. So much great music to be enjoyed!

Space
The rest of our exciting lessons have been space related, so you can check them out in Space Spectacular #2.

Friday Fun - 4/9/09

This week we've done so many great things, but I don't want to get too wordy, so I'm setting myself a challenge: No more than three sentences per item. Hopefully this will help me to use my words wisely!

Fun this week

Change the Viewpoint
In Literacy we read a segment of Hating Alison Ashley by Robin Klein. As we read we jotted down Erica's feelings and viewpoint as outlined in the text, and considered Alison Ashley's feelings and viewpoint during the same events. Students then repeated this task with a scene from the books they are currently reading for Cooperative Reading Groups.

Dancing with Footsteps
We had a free trial lesson with Footsteps Dance Company to consider their possible use for further dance sessions early next year. Students learnt a Kung Fu Panda dance and absolutely LOVED it! The dance instructor, Rachel, confidently managed the group and taught about 120 students at once - very impressive.

Treasure Seekers
My iPhone alerted me to the fact that there was a geocaching adventure just waiting to happen right near our school. I gathered up my class and let them in on the secret life of geocaching and off we went in search of our treasure. On location (and with the help of some additional hints) we found our prize and traded some school magnets for a balloon to hang in our classroom. (Photo by: JC)

Progress with Promos
Students have now completed the planning phase of their ABC3 Promos and are well underway with making backgrounds, characters and scripts. I'm a little nervous as to how we are going to pull it all together by the 18th September, but hopefully we'll find a way! We plan to dedicate some decent time to the recording side of things next Friday.

Tie-Dying Delights
The students from my home group began their Alkira projects this week with the support of some instructions on KinderArt. Students used rubber bands to create their desired effects and dyed the material up to three colours. Next week we will begin stitching on some additional items to complete our Spring Designs.

Fife and Drum Combined Practice
On Thursday Mr Tucker took the Year 4 Fife and Drum Band to another school for a Combined Band Practice and Performance. They practiced about six songs together and then performed for the students of the host school. It was another great opportunity for our musical talents to be developed and shared.

Maths Coaches
On Thursday I paired up students from Mr Tucker's maths class with students from my maths class and got them to work together on solving some word problems involving money. The coaches really took their roles seriously and gave an appropriate amount of support. They then ordered the prices on some photos of grocery items and rounded the prices to the closest 5c.

Seedlings Sprout
In a few weeks time we will be opening our school's new environment facility - The Sunlight Centre. Students have planted some seedlings that will be on sale at the opening function. It is exciting to watch them grow (but hard to remember to bring them all in at the end of the day!)


Assembly
The Year 4 students hosted this week's assembly and shared their completed homework projects for our Textiles and Design unit. The students from the Fife and Drum band were the presenters and our newly named "Showboating Showoffs" (previously Non-Fife-and-Drummers) performed dances they created themselves. The Year 4 Indonesian Dance group also performed, demonstrating how talented our Year 4s are when it comes to dancing.

Friday Fun 3/7/09 (a little late!)

It's not hard to have fun in the last week of term. There's fun stuff to finish off, and it's not really worth starting anything new, so the spare moments are fun too. On top of that, fun stuff is usually programmed into the week.

Fun this week

Another visit to the Ridge
On Monday afternoon we took another trip up the Ridge to do some weeding. We pulled up lots of verbascum and our area is now looking really great. We also took up some new brochures for the trail our school has been involved with and saw the sign that was recently installed. A journalist and photographer for the local community newspaper joined us and added our story (with front page picture) to this week's newspaper.

Green Up, Clean Up Day
The SRC held a fundraiser to purchase paint for playground markings to be sprayed under our new shade structure. Students dressed up in green and brought a gold coin donation. In order to 'clean up' and cut back on waste, our students were asked not to bring lunch items with extra packaging.

Jump Rope for Heart - Jump Off
On Thursday, we had a special assembly with Happy Heart of the Heart Foundation. The Skippy Chicks (our school's skipping team) demonstrated different skipping steps that students might like to try out individually, in pairs and with a long rope. Throughout the day classes took turns to rotate through skipping activities in the school hall. Students had fun, got fit and raised funds for research into heart disease, education and health promotion.

Mr Tucker's Balderdash Challenge
Mr Tucker was feeling more motivated than me as the week drew to a close. He set up a Balderdash Challenge with students competing for points in teams. He selected a number of Aussie slang phrases, and groups made up possible meanings for these. They then voted, with the most convincing definitions scoring the most votes.

Ned Kelly Paintings
Having learnt about Ned Kelly last week, we took a closer look at the paintings of Sidney Nolan and then students made their own Ned Kelly paintings using watercolours and ink or oil pastels. It was fun to see the unique perspectives students brought to the task. We really should do more painting!

Matilda
Mr Tucker's literacy class has been reading the book "Matilda" by Roald Dahl, so on Friday afternoon we watched the movie as a celebration and to compare the two. It's a great movie that shows how we can triumph despite adversity. The kids loved it.

Field Events
We've split our athletics carnival into two sessions this year. An afternoon for the field events and a day for the whole school to compete in the track events. Friday afternoon was the field event session and many of our students competed in shot put and long jump events.

Tech Tips Tuesday

This Week's Tip: Let them touch the tools

This week I've been thinking a lot about the magic students can do when you give them the tools. I think that often we're too scared to give kids tools to work with. We may be worried that they will break them or that they'll lose them or even that they might hurt themselves with them. We spend so much time focusing on the negatives that we may not even consider the potential of allowing students to use them.

When I was away on camp, I handed around my camera and the class' flip camera. It was really enjoyable to see how each student approached movie making. It made me realise that some students are great interviewers, others have excellent camera presence and still others are budding documentary makers!

We've also been testing out some tools from yesteryear. Descendents of Tom Lester (who found the gold that started the Australian gold rush) presented a workshop on gold for students yesterday, and they got to find 'gold' amongst the gravel using a cradle.

Later in the day, we had the opportunity to go up the Ridge again and do some weeding. Students worked in pairs with specially made hoes to dig out the verbascum up there. It is amazing the impact 60 students can have when they all work together to pull weeds for half an hour.

So, moral of the story? Whatever you're doing and whichever technologies you're using, put it into the hands of the kids. It's worth it. You'll be amazed.

Tech Tips Tuesday

This Week's Tip: Take Note of the Beauty Around You

With all the buzz and hype of Web 2.0 - developing a PLN, connecting online, and finding open education resources - I sometimes find that I haven't managed to leave the house all day. I've been so busy doing 'stuff' online that I couldn't tell you whether there was a gentle breeze blowing, or whether the roses are blooming, or the colours in the sunset. Tonight I took my dog for a walk. I looked at the ants crawling up the bark on the trees. I noticed the sun setting over the mountain ranges. And it really is beautiful. So my tech tip this week is to take note of the beauty around you. Capture it, if you can, and share it.

Someone who does this particularly well is Tony Farley. Tony has created some marvellous videos of Beautiful Places in High Definition. The images are breathtaking and the narrative well thought out. Tony gives a description of the place and its history. He then gives you a moment of silence to experience the place for yourself. Tony finishes up with a poem carefully matched to the place he is visiting. Watching these videos is the next best thing to visiting the places in person. The quality of the filming is a visual delight. To view these for yourself, you can watch them streamed from the website or subscribe and download them through iTunes.

I plan to introduce these films to my students early in the school year. I will then get them thinking and talking about local nature areas within walking distance of the school. We will travel to these places, record the area through video, still photos and audio recordings. Students may choose to respond further through researching the area, and recording their thoughts or reflections in poetry. The images and narrative can then be combined through Photostory 3 or Movie Maker. To take it even further, I will help my students to develop a wikispace to share their reflections with others. We can open it up to other people in our school community who also enjoy this local natural environment.

Another suggestion (for those who cannot work with local natural environments) is to encourage students to connect Creative Commons pictures to poetry written by others or to create poems of their own to go with the images. I have done this with Kindergarten in the past - writing haiku poems about images from cut-up nature calendars. I've also done it with Year 3 by running a slideshow of images for students to select from and write a poem about.

I guess my main message this week is not to ignore the beautiful world we live in but rather to cherish and absorb it.

The Future of the Mind - Part 1

Today I had the luxury of attending professional development on The Future of The Mind and Innovative Schools. If you have been reading my posts (I hope) you will know that this is something that I am passionate about. I am really fortunate to have a supportive principal who went out of his way to make sure I was able to attend. The day was divided into two main sessions. I will address the second session in a later post.

The first session was directed by Professor Martin Westwell from Flinders University. He has a well-developed understanding of neuroscience research and is familiar with how this research has been 'applied' in the classroom. The 'teaser' for this session was:

Within today's technology rich world, the environments that we create have the capacity to change the way that young people think, behave and learn in ways that were never before possible.

One idea that I took away from this session is that research findings from neuroscience do not, cannot and should not tell teachers how to teach. This research can 'inform' our teaching pedagogy, but should not take over from our professional judgements based on our relationship with, and knowledge of our students. Martin Westwell talked about the 'Neuro Myths' that people have adopted as they base their teaching on the 'scientific evidence'.

Neuroscience shows that different parts of the brain are active when students learn through visual, aural, and kinaestheic means. This does NOT mean that students should be labeled by their preference and taught only according to this label. Neuroscience may also show that people respond better to material when presented with humour, but we do not label these people as 'humourous learners'! Instead of forcing us to classify our students and teach to each specific learning preference, this information can simply remind us to vary the way that we present information to keep our students' minds active.

Another key idea was that there are no magic answers that are one-size-fits-all. We cannot generalise and say that any one specific strategy or technique will lead to better learning outcomes. Again, it comes down to the professional judgement of the teacher, who knows the intricate details of the needs of his/her students. We need to be creating an environment that will best meet these needs - taking from a range of strategies that are relevant to this group of children at this point in time.

Martin Westwell spoke about an experiment done on some mice. There were three groups of mice: A control group with no Huntington's disease, a group with Huntington's disease in a basic cage, and a group with Huntington's disease with an enriched environment (lots of cool playthings for mice!). Huntington's disease is a genetic disease - if you have the gene, you get the disease. HOWEVER, only 20% of the mice in the enriched environment showed symptoms of Huntington's disease, as opposed to 70-100% (can't remember, sorry!) for the ones in the basic cage. Their brain cells developed more interconnectivity than the brain cells of the mice in the basic cage. The point of all of this was the impact of the environment. By providing the right kind of environment, we can overcome all sorts of evils...

So, what does an Enriched Environment for children look like?
Martin Westwell suggested that it is:

• multi-sensory
• relevant
• contains emotional content
• involves interpersonal interaction (interdependent learning and parental engagement)
• provides for exercise
• considers nutrition/hydration
• makes use of blue light

I am interested in ideas from your experiences. What do you think are the key features for an Enriched Environment for children?