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26 June 2015

Topic Talk and Creature Mass

Hey Y’all!
It has been a few crazy weeks over here in the Thresher Household. There have been a lot of downs and some ups with my sister coming home from Europe for 10 days.

Although Kate flying home was the BEST thing to happen it also made me realize how much I was missing her and it made saying goodbye again a great deal harder…but now she is back there….there always is a string attached ;)

FYI Veronica Mars is the GREATEST TV SHOW .....EVER!!


...to top it all off reports went home yesterday and I am in the middle of parent report meetings .....
                                     

So it is basically a miracle I am blogging at all! ....BUT as they say life goes on! J To make up for the absence the last few weeks I thought I would combine two blog posts in one! J


We have just finished our topic talks and they were so AMAZING I couldn’t help but share the idea! J
Part 1: Topic Talk
I have ever really been a HUGE fan of traditional news at the best of time and wanted something a little different. I can’t take credit for the idea of topic talk because I stumbled across the idea as I will outline below but I can tell you my experience with it and my handy tips!

Before I got a full time teaching gig I used to babysit a lot to support myself through uni. I still did babysitting for one particular family during my first year of teaching and it just so happened they had a young girl at primary school who was more than happy to show me her school scrap books and work from her primary school years J

One of the items I saw that I loved was this idea of topic talk where instead of news the students talk about a given topic. The little girl had loved it and I felt I had just found the solution to my never ending problem.

We gave it a whirl last year with topics like my favourite book and my favourite animal which was great but just wasn’t hitting the vision we had for it!
We thought about it really hard and decided to link it up with our writing to further support the students understanding of the writing genre!

We started with a personal recount where students presented a recount of an event in their life for example a birthday, Christmas/Easter day or any event they felt was important to them.  

Students are allowed to present their topic talk with props but do not receive extra marks as I don’t think it is fair to penalise a child if they can’t access the same resources. In saying that the props definitely helped students’ confidence as they had something refer to and if they lost their spot from their paper they looked at their props and just started speaking! J

Props ranged from PowerPoints, photos, photo boards and physical objects!!
This term we choose to focus on procedures and boy was that exciting!!! The talks ranged from making masks and purses to how to play soccer or roast a marshmallow and even how to make homemade ice-cream!


The students really went all out on props the time around!!! Some brought in step by step visuals for their topic talk, others brought in the final product to look at or even try! YUM!!!

Definitely proud of my little Dugongs!

For both topic talks we sent home a letter outlining what we would be doing to parents and provided a copy of both the rubric we would assess from and planning templates students could fill in to help them.
You can grab both editable templates from my TPT store here for free J

Part 2: Mathematics - Mass
A few weeks ago we talked all about the mass of objects and how to measure mass using informal units like cubes.

We discussed why a standard form of measurement is needed and began to have a go at measuring the mass of items around the class using both balance scales and cubes.



In groups we made a creature out of playdough …..




We gave our creature a name and then as a class weighed each of our creatures to see who was the heaviest! Please ignore the colour of the playdough all colours were merged together by a student...... leaving this hahaha 





We then were asked to find the mass of all the playdough without using the scales and the cubes. 

The students put on their thinking caps to solve this problem wondering how they could do this! Eventually someone had a light bulb moment and suggested we add all the creatures weights together! 

We found the playdough weighed 306 cubes without having to measure it!

Well I am off to go enjoy this beautiful Perth day :) ......and possibly start watching some VM (Veronica Mars) later ;)

Catch ya! :)


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