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

An Image in Time - Jamie, Craig, Fatima, Maddy & Ben

WALHT (We Are Learning How To): Write a interesting paragraph from a picture, using metaphor and personification.

This morning for journal writing we were doing a moment in time image.  It needed to include a metaphor and personification.  We chose between two images.  One was a globe with hands, the other was a rock climbing wall.  We hope you enjoy them.

When I look at the globe I think of each hand as a country and the globe as the environment.  Each time a hand comes away, a country stops caring, making it harder for the remaining hands to take care of it.  It will end up being a concrete wasteland.  If this happens the stars will never wink again.

By Jamie

It's Craig here - I've underlined the figurative language I used, can you work out which ones I've used where?

It all started when the universe ran over to our part of the solar system and popped a balloon causing a big bang.  That was the point when our part of the solar system was invented.  Then civilization started, they began to hold the world. Later on war was invented, civilizations crumbled making it harder to hold the world.  The Earth was beginning to feel like an anchor to the people who are still holding.  Later on in time our technology has begun to pollute the land and our environment.  More hands drop.  If one more pair of hands drop, our world will be a wasteland.   

By Craig

Standing alone holding the globe all by myself.  The globe felt like I was carrying a marble but the longer I held it, the quicker I realised I was holding a dinosaur sized globe.  I felt like giving up but the globe smiled as someone else helped me hold it.  I felt like a thousand weights lifted off my shoulders.

I felt like I did quite well because a couple years ago, I wasn't sure about metaphors and personifications.  Now I can write metaphors, personifications, and similes at ease.  Journal writing has helped me lot.  Journal writing is really affective because the teachers give you a topic to write about and you have to use figurative language.  I am looking forward to more journal writing so I can improve on my weaknesses.

By Fatima

As I steer at the rock wall it laughs at me. As I start to climb the wall I turn into nimble monkey creeping to the top.

By Maddy

As I am the great billy goat I am preparing to conquer this great big mountain and guess what, it laughed at me.  I think it will be a big challenge for me!

By Ben

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!