Space Spectacular #3

Week 4 and 5 - More Finding Out and Sorting Out

The activities in these weeks were designed to provide opportunities for students to find out about space and sort their ideas in a range of forms. Students typically "found out" through books, videos, websites, songs and experiments. They "sorted out" using writing, diagrams, reports and art.

Science
One of the focus questions for this unit is: "What are the relationships between distance and apparent size of objects to an observer?" My first thought was, "Huh?" closely followed by "Hmmmm." The models we made in weeks 2 and 3 touched on this but didn't really EXPLAIN anything or help students to make these deductions. I found an explanation of Emmert's Law on Wikipedia, but it was still too confusing for Year 4 students to really grasp. Somewhere along the way I thought about the funny photos you can take that play with this concept. Like this one by Andy Hay:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyhay/ / CC BY 2.0

I found a bunch of these at 100+ Funny Photos Taken At Unusual Angles and pulled out some appropriate ones to use with my class. (WARNING: Some are inappropriate, so do not use this site uncensored with your students.)
We looked at these at the start of the lesson and discussed the concept about apparent size and distance. I compared this to the apparent sizes of the sun and moon from Earth. I then gave students two different sized balls which they took outside and had to space apart in such a way that they looked the same size when viewed through the camera. Students then glued these pictures into their books and wrote an explanation of what they did and what they learnt. Those who finished early had time to create their own funny photos using their creativity.


Integrating with Literacy

Writing an Information Report

We needed to assess students' writing in preparation for end of year progress reports, so we decided to have students research and write about the sun. Information was provided through:

• a double-page spread from a book about space (including a diagram)
  
• this NASA diagram of the sun
• this Space School video on the sun
• and the following 'music video'

Students took notes while we explored these together. We watched the videos twice each and I demonstrated how I would take notes and add to them during the second viewing. Students then had the rest of the session to begin sorting through their notes to determine which ideas could be grouped together and to consider paragraph headings.
In the following session students began writing their report and drawing a diagram. In our next session students will review their work. You can see a copy of the Assessment Booklet below:

An Information Report About The Sun

View more documents from pennyryder.

Integrating with Art

Nebula Watercolour Paintings

Having just explored the lifecycle of a star together, I showed students some photographic images of nebulas and super novas. We discussed the range of colours and the shapes and lines that were used. We then looked at these watercolour paintings by Ken Bandaruk. I gave students a large sheet of paper and some watercolours and left them to their own creativity to make nebula watercolours of their own. Once the painting was complete, students used a bamboo skewer and some white paint to add a layer of stars. Students who finished early went on to create super nova paintings using crayons and watercolours.

One Point Perspective

Building further on the concept from Emmert's Law, I taught students how to draw with one point perspective using these step-by-step instructions. Now that students have the basics, they are going to take it further, creating scenes of their own.

If you enjoyed this post, why not check out previous posts in the Space Spectacular Series.

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: Attempting to Implement the Quality Teaching Model with the Aid of ICT #1

One of my goals for this year is to find a way to use ICT as a tool with the Quality Teaching Model (currently being implemented in NSW and the ACT) to improve teaching and learning in the classroom. I do a lot of this automatically, but I want to be able to share these ideas with others. Of course, the success of the lesson is not solely dependent on the actual ICT, so it makes it a little hard to suggest that any one tool or strategy is good for any one of the elements of the Quality Teaching Model. I want to share this journey with you and help you to see that the ICT needs to be embedded in quality teaching and pedagogy and not just used as an add-on.

For example, today ICT wasn't the focus of my lesson, but was definitely a helpful tool in my preparation. My students and I have been reading "New Gold Mountain" by Christopher W Cheng, which is about a Chinese boy, Shu Cheong, who came to Australia to find gold during the goldrush. I want my students to connect with the story personally and to gain a greater respect for Chinese culture as a result. As Shu Cheong is learning to write English words in the book, I thought it might be helpful for students to try writing their names with Chinese characters. In preparation for today's lesson, I downloaded the following videos from You Tube and translated all my students' names into Chinese characters at Chinese Names.org. After reading and discussing a few pages together as a class, we watched the videos to see Chinese calligraphy being created by the experts.



While students were watching, I set out some black ink, brushes and paper on each of the desks. Students then attempted to write their names using the little name strips I'd prepared for them earlier. Also whilst reading, we did a Google search for Cai Shen in our attempt to find out more about one of the gods mentioned in the book. Throughout the book reference is given to Chinese religious beliefs so we wanted to know more in order to understand his perspective more fully.

Quality Teaching Model Coding
For this lesson I will only look at the Intellectual Quality dimension.
The videos helped to provide deep knowledge about the art of calligraphy and the style used by calligraphers. It didn't really provide detailed knowledge about the history of calligraphy, but it did allow students to see calligraphy in action.
Students haven't yet demonstrated a deep understanding of their experience with trying to write in another script. Further discussion would allow me to see whether this activity has helped them to identify with the experiences of the Shu Cheong in the book.
Our discussion during reading touched on metalanguage when we defined some words in the text. To improve this element further, I could have discussed the Chinese script and sought comparisons with the script we use for English (does anyone know what our script is called?).
The videos inspired substantive communication around calligraphy and it's use in both China and Japan. Students shared of their own experiences with calligraphy and together we discussed whether Chinese script should be written horizontally or vertically.
I don't feel that this lesson really allowed for higher order thinking. The lesson was generally teacher-directed and students didn't really ask or answer any questions that required higher order thinking.
The discussion around religious beliefs added a little to the provision for problematic knowledge - where ideas can be shared from a variety of viewpoints - but again, I feel that we explored the ideas of Chinese spirituality, but only touched on other religious viewpoints.

As I hope you can see, it's not the resources that you use that make it quality teaching or not, it's what you do with them and the thinking that results through discussion and careful questioning. I see that I have some work to do to further improve my teaching in these areas!