Inquiry Report

I wanted to share with you the wonderful variety of learning experiences our students are having during our current inquiry into geography. Our focus has been quite wide as students have demonstrated immense curiosity into the subject. Here are some photos to explain some of the things that are happening in our neighbourhood at the moment.

Some of our students are investigating rainfall. They have converted disposable drink bottles into rain gauges and placed them around the school. These students check their gauges frequently and are graphing their results.

Meanwhile, some of our students are investigating weather by keeping diaries. Some have created weather diaries, while some are researching cloud formations and their relationship to weather. Here is an example of a weather diary.

Another weather investigation takes the form of music. Here students express different kinds of weather phenomena through the use of musical instruments or through digital music making software such as GarageBand.

Here is an example of a rock collection that a student has made. They are currently identifying the different rocks they have found around school, or brought from home, and are then classifying them into igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks.

There are many more experiences occurring in our neighbourhood at the moment and hopefully, I will have the opportunity to share more with you soon.

Landmarks of the World

I would like to present to you a our World Map of Landmarks. We have only been working on this map for a couple of weeks so far in ICT and LA time in our neighbourhood but I thought it's a wonderful example of how we can use ICT to share knowledge within our learning community.

Our students researched some famous landmarks around the world, looking at their history, cultural significance as well as their physical attributes during our ICT sessions. We investigated ways of inserting our information in Google Maps to share this information with our colleagues.

It is still in work-in progress but here it is so far. You get a better experience by seeing it in FULL VIEW here.


View Earth Report Map 2011 in a larger map

- Click on a tab to see some information (blue = manmade landmarks, red = natural landmarks).
- Click on "more' to get the option of zooming into the landmark.

Inquiry learning term 4

Our focus for inquiry learning this term is in the humanities area of geography.  The children are working towards producing an Earth Report as a culmination of their inquiry into a range of geographical concepts. 

For further details, please refer to the Student Learning section of our blog.

Afternoon tea with Patrick

We were very sad to have to say goodbye to Patrick earlier this week. Patrick has been with our neighbourhood since the beginning of the year as a part of his Masters of Teaching course at Melbourne University and have thoroughly become a member of the neighbourhood team. He has built up wonderful relationships with our students though his enthusiastic style of teaching.

We would therefore like to celebrate Patrick's achievements by having an afternoon tea this coming Monday (31st) at 2:30 pm. We invite all students to bring a dish of choice which we can share amongst our neighbourhood.

Press Club - Episode 2

Just a quick note to inform you that the second episode of the Princess Hill Press Club can now be accessed through the Intranet section of the website. The username and password has been published in week 6 edition of Talking Point and will be again in the next week edition.

Peer assessment

Neighbourhood 1 has spent the last three weeks investigating and developing our understanding of what an assessment is. We have looked at various projects produced by students around the school and discussed and recorded our ideas on different elements, that put together, make a successful project. After collating these information generated by the students, and discussing further the exact wording, we are now in the process of producing a rubric. This rubric will then be used by the students to peer assess the projects produced by their fellow learners in the neighbourhood.

Incursions

We were very fortunate to have two special guests in our neighbourhood last Wednesday.

Laura Pearse came in to our neighbourhood and presented her incredible VCE media project she created last year. Laura, who is a god-daughter of Julie Effemey, graduated from her high school last year and is currently on a gap year. For her project, she created a film inspired by Jim Henson which incorporated puppets and live action actors. She gave an inspiring talk about her filmmaking journey, through the processes of designing and creating her puppets to storyboarding and directing her wonderful film. It was lovely to see the enthralled faces of our students as they watched the final product at the end.

Laura shows introduces our neighbourhood to one of her creations.

Laura with her fox puppet.

On the same day, Bruce Kane from Australian Broadcast Cooporation came in to our neighbourhood to show us a funny animated short called "Teach Maths To Your Dog". After the viewing, Bruce received some insightful feedback from our students.

Bruce Kane introducing the animated short.

We would like to thank both Laura and Bruce for giving up their time and providing our neighbourhood with rich and exciting presentations.