Sorry for my intermittent posts of late. Each day I tell myself to go and add just a little something, but then I always seem to get distracted by other things, more often than not mindless ones!!
So what has been going on of late?
As some of you who know me would know, I'm really in to Inquiry and Project Based Learning, which happened to be the focus of my trip overseas earlier this year.
I'm lucky to work with some teachers who are also keen to dip their toes into maths projects, and I totally understand their nervousness and hesitation, as it does require them to let go a little (and a lot!) of their control and hand it over to the kids.
It's my belief that if the content is engaging enough, and at the kid's level with just the right amount of challenge, they'll take to it like ducks to water.
Last week we launched a new maths project with the Gr 5's at my school titled "The Block 2016".
It is based on the tv show of the same name and the first challenge that the kids have is to design a bedroom with a $10 000.00 budget.
Rather than planning ahead what we will teach them, we let certain content surface naturally then address it on a needs basis. This is not to say it is totally loose, as we are aware of what content and skills focus will need specific teaching, but we are letting it arise naturally when the kids need it.
For example, in the first few days it became clear that the kids could not all make life size beds out of newspapers to see what they looked like in real life. 27 kids in one room trying to create 27 bedrooms? We'd need a paddock to fit them all in!!
So, this was when it was an opportune time to address the concept of scale, and the kids were primed and ready for it.
Let me say, the lessons I took for two classes this week were just the most fun as they were so tuned in for something that they needed to know. By mixing it up with practical examples, the kids were able to see how we could shrink the size of the actual bed 100 times, and then make the planning and organisation of our rooms much more practical.
Plus, their amazement at how they could do this so easily came as a real surprise, and the work they produced was excellent.
Imagine the mess we made, a mess that we didn't care about because the learning was more important. They will now use these same skills for the rest of their house.
In my mind, this is a much more beneficial way of covering measurement rather than getting the kids to complete mindless worksheets that have no relevance or worth to the children.
This is the size of an actual single bed. What you can't see is the scale model of it, which was only 2cm x 1 cm
So why 'The Block'?
A couple of years ago at my previous school we developed this same project, but it only began with one room. The success of doing it just snowballed into planning other rooms, then a whole house. The kids (and teachers!) became so absorbed in it, to the point where we ended up making 3D scale models out of recyclable materials after seeing how to do this from a visit to our local Building Apprentice Trade School.
The culmination of our project was an expo of all of the work that the kids had done, and we actually had two of the stars from the series of The Block that was on tv at the time come to our school to see the work the kids had done.
They were just brilliant, and the school was full of visitors for the day celebrating the amazing work completed by the kids.
This is the clip I made to launch the project, I hope it plays on here!!!!!
If not, I hope to get it fixed!
Until my next post...
Cheers!
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