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.
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! :)
