Inferencing by The Brilliants

For the past two reading lessons the Brilliants have been doing a presentation on inferencing using fotobabble. 

We've been using the language from our Inquiry Model on this blog and you might be wondering what it's all about!  Here's a copy of the reading one (they'll all the same, it's just that the words that are especially helpful in each subject have been bolded to help us.)

This is what we did...

Building Knowledge.  First we brought what we knew about inferencing and found that all of us together had enough information to do it ourselves, though we found some more information and brainstormed together. 

Then we moved to Making Meaning, where we summarised it and considered how to organise it all. We negotiated what we would include in our presentation and who would say each part and we knitted some ideas together where possible. Then we began to plan and assemble our script.

Finally we moved to Applying our Understanding where we created our fotobabble. We created the script and applied our understanding by creating our own example of inferencing and we justified why it was inferencing. We solved the problem of writing our everyone's parts seperately by working off our original piece of paper. We also solved the problem of running out of time on fotobabble by taking out the dictionary definition we had - it was too long and we thought it actually made things quite confusing! We replaced it with our own definition which we thought was better anyway. We considered the possibilities of how to make a member of the group stay quiet (this was quite difficult) and came up with a solution to help them. Last but not least we applied what we learnt to our blog and recounted all the steps.

Break Through!

By Jamie and Alex

Fotobabble and the six thinking hats help us to reflect

This is our groups Fotobabble (made by Jamie, Hossain, Edwin, Ruby and Dani.) It is about the Six Thinking Hats which we use to help us to write a better Learning Journal. To find out more about these hats, check out this link that we found. The Six Thinking Hats - these hats were created by Dr Edward de Bono.

How have you used the Six Thinking Hats?

By Jamie and Hossain

School sports uniform presentation

In term 2 Hub 3 started doing P.E and we had to get changed, we did not have a school sports uniform, so we brought our own old clothes. Damien, Fatima and Dani one day thought that we should have a school sports uniform. So Miss Holland suggested that we do a P.M.I presentation and present it to the Friends of Stonefields School, the Board of Trustee's and Miss Martin (she's our principal) Then after that, Miss Martin asked us if we would like to be in the design process of the school sports uniform! We were definitely going to say yes!

We were so excited, we were so privileged that we could help make the school sports uniform happen and be the first learners to present at the FOSS (Friends of Stonefields School) meeting! That night at the meeting, we presented our Prezi and everyone agreed with us. We should have a sports uniform because of a lot of reasons but our favourite reason is that it will represent our school at races, will look much more smart and will be more comfortable because not all of us have enough good exercise clothing at home.

We got to look at some sample uniforms and are going to be involved in helping to design the uniform and decide which one we get.

We think we need shirts with sleeves for sun protection (and most of FOSS agreed with us) but some people think short sleeves look sportier. What do you think is the best option? and why do you think that?

We are looking forward to hearing from you.

See ya!

Fatima and Dani

PMI about sports uniform on Prezi

Obelix - Weird Science Goop!

On Friday, Learning Hub 3 had their very own assembly. We sang a song that Hub 3 created with a little bit of help from Miss Smerdon. We did lots of awesome stuff like teaching how to make music with graphic notation and being mad scientists. You know what, it was really funny because we chose people to be to be a body and then we chose other people to be the arms. The body people put their arms behind their backs while the people who were the arms slipped their hands through and pretended to be the same person. The arms did all sorts of wacky things like feeding the body sandwiches and shapes and answered science questions. We were really proud of our assembly because we did almost everything by ourselves.

In the second block, we went outside and made obelix with Miss Holland. Obelix is a type of goop, made with cornflour, water and just to make it more fun, some food colouring (see how to make it here, it's pretty easy... http://sciencesquad.questacon.edu.au/activities/cornflour_slime.html) We mixed it together in our groups of 4 to 6 (which is called collaborating!) and had lots of fun and got messy!

The goop felt weird. It felt hard when you started to roll it around but when you stopped moving it, it fell through your fingers like slime. Very creepy! When we went to pick it up the slime parted almost like runny plastic might and when we punched it the slime was quite hard and you didn't get much on your fingers. It was like punching a tree trunk but a bit gooier.

Afterwards we talked about how things can be in different states. They're either solid, liquid or gas. This goop was strange because it was liquid and solid at the same time! Now we're going to find out why it does what it does because we haven't seen anything like this before.

By Dani and Maddy

(You should try this at home!)

Goop from Sarah Holland on Vimeo.

Be sure to watch right through to the end to see our video recordings of the goop in action!