Well we are off on holidays for two weeks!

Yee haaa

See you all when we get back

  :cool:  

A little while ago we were part of the Sydney Writer’s Festival and took part in a writer’s workshop and masterclass with Alison Lester. Alison wrote the book “Are We There Yet?” which we read when we were looking at Australian history.

Please click on this link (the photo of the book) which will take you to the site so you can watch the Masterclass (and see some AllStars in the audience :)  )

Thanks for your photo Carronshore ;) 

As part of our “History Never Repeats?” question we have been reading some of Shakespeare’s plays, because Shakespeare was an important part of history as well as writing a number of historical plays.  

We have chosen to perform “Macbeth” for our class item in Assembly this week. After being inspired by Kindergarten’s performance of the story “A Dark, Dark Tale” we decided to re-write Macbeth in the same way.

To help us sort out the parts of the story we would perform, we all used Mind Maps to organise and identify the important parts of the story. You can see a composite of what we came up with on this Bubbleshare presentation ……..

[bubbleshare 232192.d42832b4179]

We had to add the “Dark, dark” tale bits to join the story together.

Now we have to work out who will be each character and practise on the stage.

We hope to video our performance and put it, and some still photos, on our blog after Friday, so stay tuned ……

What do you think Shakespeare would say about us changing his play?  

Last Friday some visitors from BECTA in the UK came to visit our school to see what schools would look like in the future. There were six visitors. They only stayed for about twenty minutes in our classroom but stayed in the school for the whole morning. 

We had a couple of groups and each group had a different subject, which we did in class. Everyone got to choose what we wanted to do. 

They were:  

• Mission Maker   
• Scratch 
• Voki
• Bubble Share (Macbeth)
• Wii

We each showed how we used the technology, why we used it and what it had to do with school. We all enjoyed sharing what we did, we could have talked all day about what we did at school, but the visitors only stayed for a short time! 

          Wii           The Visitors (Men in Suits) 

    Scratch           MissionMaker 

  By: Celia, Sharon and Natalie 

We have been  using a game making program called MissionMaker to make learning about history fun and interesting. We have been researching a person, place or civilization from either of these periods: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern  as part of our “History Never Repeats?” Project. 

We have to apply the information that we gathered from our “History Never Repeats?” Project and apply it to our MissionMaker game. We are nearly ready to make our own MissionMaker game.  

So far each person in the class has created a Mind Map and created a game story related to their game.We are going to use the game story and Mind Map as the base for our game.  

 We have been trying to transfer our game ideas, characters and worlds to the ones available in MissionMaker. This has not always been easy because of the limited worlds, characters and props in the game.

  By Martin, Matthew, Momtahina & Dushan     :cool:   

The AllStars have been studying history this year and are pondering the saying

“History never repeats”

Read this article about Stonehenge and then leave a comment about what you think!

:-? 

What were you thinking about as you read this article?

What surprised you about this article? Why were you surprised?

What sorts of images or feelings did the article stimulate?

Why do you think scientists are so interested in finding out how people lived in times past?

Does the information that the scientists gather have any impact on our lives today? 

Do you think that a shared knowledge & understanding of times past can / does help us understand problems and issues of today?