Are You Ready To Be Awesome?

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Everyone needs some encouragement now and then, and today is the day you can create AWESOME!
Watch this pep-talk clip by KidPresident, and get ready to be the best you can be 🙂

Please leave a comment telling us what you will be creating, investigating or trying!

What Are You Wondering?

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The world is an interesting place and this website has so many interesting things to find out about.

Have a look at some of the pages on the Wonderopolis site and start thinking about something that gets your wondering!

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WONDEROPOLIS

Leave a comment to let us know what you are wondering 🙂

 

The Lorax

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Many students in S23Jade have been thinking and talking about the environmental issues raised in the Dr Seuss story “The Lorax”.

They have discussed, acted out and spoken at a town meeting using the different perspectives of the creatures involved in the story.

As a “wrap up” activity students were asked to design a Thneed Factory that was more environmentally positive and sustainable than the one in the story. They were asked to consider the energy used, the pollution released and the effect on the living creatures around the factory, the noise and the transportation of the finished Thneeds around the country.

There were many fantastic ideas and suggestions made by the students – please look at the following pictures of parts of their work.

 

What do you think? What would you do to improve the environment at the Thneed Factory? Leave a comment below.

Digital Citizenship

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Stage 3 students are exploring what it means to be positive digital citizens.

We have linked into our school “Shine Guide” to help us see that being a positive citizen on-line is not so different to being a positive citizen off-line!

We are still finding out about all of the different ways that we can be positive and safe on-line; and later we will be making a plan or poster or presentation about what we can do to make sure that we are positive digital citizens.

Digital Citizens

Timelines

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Stage 3 students are learning history this term. They have been using timelines to organise the information they have found, and have discovered that there are lots of places, people and artifacts that can be used to find out about the world.

In the Library, we have been looking at how historians work, the sources of information they use and the type of questions they ask to gather information.

We have compared primary and secondary sources, sorted information found and decided if information is reliable, useful or just interesting.

here are some photos of us transferring our thinking form paper to the ipads using Popplet, which is a mind-mapping tool.

What Do We Know About … Ancient Civilizations?

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This term we are going to be exploring ancient civilizations, so to start us off we needed to know what we already knew.

We had our task ….

 … and the way we went about this was to get into groups of 3 or 4 and work together to present our groups’ definition of Ancient Civilizations. It was VERY noisy as each group talked, and acted, and shared and mimed (and occasionally yelled!!!!).

Each group came up with a unique way looking at ancient civilizations, and the audience was able to ask questions and ellicit the ideas of the group members so that we came up with some shared understandings of what we knew about ancient civilizations already.

 

Hmmmm I wonder where this will lead???

Conscience Alley

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Today we tried a great thinking activity during reading.

MrsP was reading us “Rowan of Rin” and the villagers were trying to decide whether or not to climb the mountain to see if they could find out what was blocking the stream.

We stopped reading and got into two groups:

  • one group discussed why the villagers should go to find out why the stream had stopped;
  • the second group discussed why the villagers shouldn’t go.

Then the two groups stood face to face and made an alley-way up the middle. Then we chose a student to be a villager and walk up the alley.

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As the villager walked up the alley, everyone (one person at a time) said their a reason to either go up/ or not go up the mountain. DSC09857DSC09858

At the end of the alley the villager had to make a decision about what she would do. Today the villager decided to go up the mountain!

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This was just as well, because the villagers in the story also decided they had to climb the mountain too 🙂

  • Do you believe that this activity helped you to think more deeply about the decision that the villagers had to make?
  • Did you feel more involved in the story after thinking about the story in this way?

Light Fantastic!

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Our focus for the next few weeks is all about light.

Today we thought about what we already knew about light and dark, shadows, lenses, colour, rainbows and our eyes.

We knew some things but we have a lot of questions too 🙂

Here is a collection of our thoughts so far. We used the “Think Puzzle Explore” routine to organise our thinking this afternoon:

 

 

Please scroll to the right on the lino presentation to see more stickies!

The “Other” NAPLAN

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Now that the NAPLAN tests are out of the way we came up with some ideas of things we would really love to learn about.

We organised them into headings and came up with “another” NAPLAN that we think is great 🙂

N = NEWS

We like to know what’s happening in the world.

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A = ARTS

 We would like to have lots of opportunities to find out about the Arts. 

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P = PLAYING

We learn lots of things by playing.

 

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L = LOVES & PASSIONS

These are interests & hobbies & things we just love to learn about.

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A = ANCIENT

Old, old, old

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N = NATURE

The world around us

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S= SCIENCE

How things work, what happens and why?????

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What do you think?

What would you really like to learn about, or learn to do?