Inquiry in Term 2

Our Inquiry Units in Term 2 will revolve around the same concept in both Language A and Humanities. This guy might give you a clue as to what that concept is!

Prizes will go to

a) Those who can identify who this dapper looking fellow is; and

b) What the Key Concept for these units is

Have a good holiday, and I’ll see you all in Term 2!

 

Mr Huebl

Who is this?

Screencasts

This term in Language A (English) we have been writing explanations. A creative outlet for publishing these pieces of writing was to record them as audio. This seemed a little bit down towards the S/A end of the SAMR model, so we redesigned the task to make using technology to present the work less ingenuous. It was decided that the topic of the explanation whould be ICT related, so the students could present their writing in screencast form.

The brief given to the students was to explain how to do something on a computer. This could be anything from changing the size of writing in a word processor, to airbrushing photos in Photoshop.

The formal writing process was undertaken initially, with planning, sequencing, editing and drafting taking place with gold old pen and paper. When the piece of writing had been suitably crafted and completed, the students then got the laptops out and began the presentation process. Using Quicktime, the students recorded the action of their process, while reciting the ‘script’ which was their finished explanation. Others chose to use the creen capture to record only the on screen actions. This movie was imported into Garage Band, and the students narrated over the top.

We are all very happy with our finished products, which all students have posted to their personal blogs. Below we have three, selected by the Year 3 students the videos were designed for. Please visit individual student blogs to view the rest of the videos. Enjoy!

 

Eva Screencast from SAS Year 6 on Vimeo.

Henry Screencast from SAS Year 6 on Vimeo.

Laura’s Screencast Final from SAS Year 6 on Vimeo.

 

Henny’s Math Lesson

Today, Mr Huebl asked all the people who had finished their enlargement, to find something productive to do. Somebody piped up with the bright idea to give everyone a cartoon to draw, so we could do a 6HU Mash Up, of lots of different characters.

I explained to the class what we would be doing this Math lesson, and we made a list of the characters everyone wanted to do. Instead of enlarging, we were going to be reducing our characters. Mr Huebl even joined in himself, because he decided not to interfere with my teaching. Over all, my lesson went well, Mr Huebl finished first, and everyone enjoyed themselves.

We will update with the finish product when it’s done!

“I think this Math lesson was very interesting, because to choose our own characters to draw, and it was a change from enlargement to reduction.” – Henry

 

Laura and Maggie
maggiesas.edublogs.org
laurasas.edublogs.org

Emily and Eva
emilysas.edublogs.org
evasas.edublogs.org

Mr Huebl & Laura working on their reductions
laurasas.edublogs.org

Sharing in the 100 Word Challenge

In 6HU, we are habitual participants in the 100 Word Challenge, a global writing challenge that develops writing skills in students by asking them to respond to a stimulus in only 100 words. This is indeed a challenge sometimes, as it can be difficult to frame our ideas into such a small amount of words. Similarly, some students can find reaching 100 words without ‘waffling’ the real challenge.

Usually, the challenge stimulus is a picture or a phrase. These really allow the students to develop ideas around a theme and apply their writing skills to the task. Every week, we will frame our responses with whatever our focus has been in the classroom for writing or grammar. For example, we might all incorporate direct speech into our responses, or perhaps the focus will be on the use of adjectives. Some students like to try incorporating their spelling list words into their responses, while keeping the meaning of their writing relevant.

This week, the prompt was not a picture or a phrase, but rather an introduction to a concept. This concept was that of sharing, and can be seen here. The contrasting nature of the images brought to mind by an Ethiopian child with the description of the child’s actual reality was one that took some of us some time to get past. This boy did not seem to live in poverty, or want for food, but our preconceptions led us to assume that he would be. In fact, he was being held up as an example of the joy to be gained from sharing what we have with others. These mixed feelings that the prompt elicited in us, held us back as we began our writing.

Despite that fact we had been given the instruction of beginning our responses with “If we share…” a lot of us were unsure of what to write, as more often than not, our responses are narrative based and this seemed to require something quite different. Using a variation of a Y-Chart, we unpacked the concept of sharing, examining what it meant to share as well as some of the more abstract uses of the word; share a meal, share a decision, share an experience.

In the end, everyone was very pleased with what they came up with. We will not highlight any individual posts here, as we feel everyone did very well, so we are listing them all. We would really value your comments about how we have chosen to represent a concept through our writing.

Billy, Harry, Jack, Henri, Ellaina, Charlotte, Paris, DiHan, Chris, Thomas, Scott, Cooper, Emily, Nathan, Laura, Alyshia, Henry, Eva, Cody, Henny.

 

Building our understanding

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In 6HU, we are aware that learning is an ongoing process. It is not a case of the teacher telling us something, and us remembering it. We continually build on what we have discovered, creating our own meaning over time. We are showcasing this trait this week, by sharing our learning journey on the topic of cyberbullying. We reflected on a post we made last week, and expanded on those initial thoughts. Some of us chose to make this elaboration more meaningful by presenting using audio or video.

Here is a selection of links from our class:

Maggie

Ellaina

Billy

Chris

Henny

 

 

Battleship Maths

As a follow on from our Zombie Maths activity yesterday, we played class Battleship in Maths today. We got the idea from William Chamberlain who commented on our post and shared his class blog post about his class learning the same type of Maths. As a nod to this international sharing, we decided to give his lesson a go – with a few changes.

Our Battlefield

First, we marked out a 5×5 grid on the carpet and labelled the axis.

 

We started the activity with the students laying out their ‘ships’ on their own 5×5 grids. We had a 4, 3 and a 2 square ship to lay out on the grid anyway we liked. Then we placed our ‘soldiers’ on the grid squares one by one and the students marked them off, much like a game of Bingo. We decided to award both the first and the last place getters, as the ‘winners’ would be the first to have their ships sink, and the ‘losers’ would be the survivors!

After this first game, we found that most of the class were finishing at the same time. Putting a gamification hat on, I asked the students, how we could change the game to alter the way the results played out. Ideas included fewer players, more squares and a different number of ships.

It’s a hit!

What impressed me the most was an idea that suggested the outcome be altered. There were 25 squares, corresponding with 25 students in the class. The suggestion was to give everybody a square, then there would be only one winner. It was proposed if the fairness of the game could be altered by

Placing the soldiers on the grid

letting players choose their own square or whether the players should announce their square to other players. I was noticing that the game of Battleship had evolved into the design of a fair chance game. This impressed me because it showed the kind nature of my students in wanting the game to give equality to all participants.

The irony of this in a competitive context was not lost on some of my more ‘enthusiastic’ students who

‘complained’ that this wasn’t really a game anymore, as there was no strategy, only pure luck. I pounced on this as an opportunity to have the class define in their own way ‘what is it that makes a game?’ and how we could change the rules and parameters of our ‘Battleship Activity’ to create the best game we could.

I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with!

One of our brave soldiers

 

Note: We have updated the rules here.

Zombie Maths

In Maths we have started looking at Location. Our task today was to draw a map on some graph paper, and using grid coordinates, come up with some questions that would test our classmates’ knowledge of plotting a map. We were also told to include a scale on our map so that we could have measurement and converstion questions.

We decided to create a map of a town, including shops, houses and a graveyard. Then we thought that it would be fun to have zombie based questions! Our first idea was ‘How long would it take for a zombie to get to the school if it walks at 5km/h?’ Then we thought about practical zombie considerations such as fences, roads, parks etc that would affect its movement.

 

 

 

These are the questions we have come up with so far…

  • “If the number of the sectors in the cemetery represent the speed in km/h that zombies from that sector can walk, how long would it take for the hospital to be completely overrun?”
  • “If a family member wanted to get a shotgun from the store to kill a zombie, how far would it be from the mansion to the school?”
By Alyshia and Leanne

 

2013

6HU are back with a new line up in 2013. We have our individual student blogs still listed on our class home page, and we are looking forward to sharing our learning with the world.

Our first Unit of Inquiry this year is into Digital Citizenship. We have begun by examining the importance of being secure when we are online. Our student blogs have ‘Password Security Checklists’ that we have designed for our Year 1 Buddies.

We are reading the novel “I left my Mobile at the Mall” by Wendy Harmer. It tells the story of a teenage girl, whose life is turned upside down when she… well, you can guess.

We will be regularly posting entries in the 100 Word Challenge and posting our inquiry reflections on our student blogs. Highlights of class activities will feature on this class blog.

We are all looking forward to a fantastic year in 2013!

Mr Huebl & 6HU

Water Rockets

As part of our ‘Teacher for a Day’ activities, Declan and Matthew ran a Water Rocket lesson. We brought materials for water rockets so that we could get lots of people to make water rockets. the lesson went really well and everyones worked and it was very fun.

Photoshop Santas

As part of our Christmas Inquiry, we are looking at the different types of Christmas Cards people send. We have decided to make our own dress up cards by using Photoshop to make us into Santas. We will be using these images on cards we will make for our families. This is an example of our teacher, Mr Huebl as Santa.

Fake Book

Your Humanities task this week is to make a ‘FakeBook‘ account for your ingenious thinker.

You will need to pick appropriate ‘events’ from your thinker’s life and make them the posts. How others reacted to these events will be comments for these posts.

Think about what sort of information your thinker would want to share with the world if they lived in an era of social networking. What would they keep secret? Who would they be friends with?

Have fun… and post the link to your post as a comment!