Urrbrae Agriculture High School Excursion

Posted on September 4, 2018 by lisasporn

Last Wednesday the Year 2 classes from Craigburn Primary visited Urrbrae Agricultural High School. This excursion relates to our Inquiry into raw and processed items. We visited lots of different animals to see the products they produce and when we returned to school created mind maps showing the items that come from each animal, for example: cattle can produce meat to eat and leather for clothing or furniture.

It was a wonderful day. We loved having the Year 10 students as our tour guides and we think they did an excellent job – they knew lots of details about every farm animal that we visited. We asked LOTS of questions during our visit and have more questions we want to investigate now that we’re back at school.

What was your favourite part of our excursion and tell us why?

The Learning Pit

Posted on June 7, 2018 by lisasporn

Our class has been discussing ways we cope when we learn new information and try new activities. We looked at ‘the Learning Pit‘ and discussed how this relates learning in our class everyday.

We watched a 3 part series of YouTube clips that explained how we need to focus on having a Growth Mindset and be open to trying new ideas, use old and new strategies, ask for help/ offer help to others, how we feel frustrated or confused by new ideas, making connections to past information to use in new learning, persist and not quit and celebrate the successes we feel when we learn and understand a new idea/ concept.

As we viewed each clip we discussed how it related to our experiences when learning new information and trying new activities. Then we created our own posters to explain how each of us connected our learning to the Learning Pit.

Our posters are outside our classroom – please pop in for a visit and discuss them with our class. We’d love to explain our posters and how we have connected to the Learning Pit.

Inquiry – Change Over Time

Posted on August 15, 2017 by lisasporn

This week we started investigating our latest Inquiry topic. This topic is about the concept of investigating how objects have changed over time. This could include many different artefacts, including ourselves.

We’ve started our ‘Tuning In‘ time by sharing different objects from home that come from all different parts of our lives. So far we’ve heard about:

a pewter mug
an acrylic painting
an ink well and writing implement
a copper cooking pot
a book
a snuff box
stamp collections
old photographs of family members
just to get us started. We can’t wait to see what our classmates bring in!

Another ‘Tuning In‘ task was to sort pictures of different artefacts into 2 piles – either Long Ago or Today. This created really interesting discussions about why people had sorted their cards into certain piles. Then we did a ‘gallery walk‘ to see how other groups had sorted their pictures. We LOVE using pictures in our Inquiry.

Today we did a placemat activity. An artefact was put onto different placemats and we talked to our partners to discuss what it might be, what was it made of, how was it used and what might it look like today – how has it changed? Then we recorded onto our placemats using these titles to sort our thinking:

What is it?
How does it……?
It reminds me of…….
Wonderings……..

These are our wonderings on our placemats.

We wonder what we’ll investigate next?

We love seeing these new artefacts and discovering how they’ve changed over time.

What do you think we might investigate next?

City Planners

Posted on August 7, 2017 by lisasporn

As a part of our Inquiry into structures features we worked together on a special task. As we came to the end of this topic, we decided to create a town together using all of the concepts we’ve learnt over the past few weeks – considering the geography of where it should be built, the climate we’d build it in, the types of materials available and what makes a stable structure.

The first part of our plan was where would we place our new development (Geography) – the group decided on a flat plain area in South Australia. We also wanted to have a river nearby as a source of water for the town’s residents and for any industry in the town, e.g. the power station.

Then we brainstormed what a town needs vs wants. On our list below you’ll see some ‘wants’ crept onto the list – it was for the locals to be entertained and to attract more people to visit the town.

Our list was:

a power station
a shopping centre – with food shops a top priority
an apartment block
homes
a Kindy
a school
a high school
a University
a hospital
a dentist
a vet
a train station
a petrol station
an airport
a farm
a cafe
a park
a zoo – for locals to visit and attract tourists
a Police station
a Fire station
a courthouse
a gaol
a park
public toilets
a motel for tourists
a carpark
a bridge
a cinema
a bank.

Each student then chose a structure to make- using past information about what buildings look like, how they’re designed, the look of the structure and the materials that are available in the local area to help with construction. (These points covered all of the key concepts of our Inquiry).

Here is our mind map – it lists structures and who was responsible to create it.

Then we had a couple of very busy days of construction – we’d created rough drawings, plans and located the materials we needed. It was VERY busy!

Today we finally put our new city/ town together. We had a long and very detailed discussion about how to plan a town, where structures should be placed and why (most importantly).

Jesse and Riley volunteered to make roads for our town and a river too. Thanks for volunteering for the extra preparations boys.

We noticed that we’d used a grid pattern to create our town – all flowing from the original main street. This is how many towns and cities are planned around the world.

The entire town:

After we’d finished creating our town we wrote a report on Seesaw – we included a photo of the town, using a bird’s eye view to try and include all of the details, labels naming each structure and a descriptive sentence to explain our decisions. We’ve already received some great feedback from parents about our town – we loved reading their comments.

Here we are trying to get the best angle for our bird’s eye photo and recording our information about the town. We always work together to help with any technical ‘issues’ = teamwork!

What do you think of the town we’ve created? Does is have everything it needs or can you offer some suggestions of more items we could include?

What was your favourite part of creating our town together and why?

Aboriginal Structures

Posted on June 5, 2017 by lisasporn

On Friday we worked with Jasmine Miller our Aboriginal Education Community Worker to investigate different structures used by Aboriginal people – both today and in the past. Jasmine gave us a great description of the different structures that Aboriginals like to build if they’re living on the land, e.g. a wiltja, a humpie. She also showed different houses that Aboriginals live in if they live in cities, towns or on missions. These photos gave us a good insight into Aboriginal lives.

Then we went outside with Jasmine to try and create a model of a wiltja. We collected sticks, twigs, leaves, nuts and any other natural materials that could be used. Jasmine gave us some tips and advice on how we could put the materials together to create a wiltja.

Here are our models:

What do you think of our models?

Open Art Morning

Posted on November 30, 2016 by lisasporn

This morning all of the Year 2 classes were open for our families to visit and see all of our latest artistic creations. It was lovely to have so many parents, grandparents brothers, sisters and cousins visit. Each student used the brochure they’d prepared for the tour and took their visitor around the room explaining all of the creations we’d made as a part of our Inquiry topic.

What was your favourite part of having visitors to our classroom? Why?

Urrbrae Secondary School Excursion

Posted on June 27, 2016 by lisasporn

Today the Year 1/2 and Year 2 classes visited Urrbrae Secondary School and the Nature Education Centre as a part of our current Inquiry unit about Ecosystems and the human impact upon ecosystems.

WOW!!! We had a fantastic day and learnt so much new information from the experts there.

We didn’t know a lot about freshwater ecosystems – now we do.

We started our day at the Nature Education Centre, where Sally introduced us to a ring tailed possum, a bearded dragon lizard, a sleepy lizard, a carpet python and an owl.

Next, we walked over to the wetlands area and walked on a special trail to explore the plants and larger animals that live in this habitat. Each team had a recorder with a checklist, one person with a microscopic view finder, one person with the charts to help identify creatures that we saw and everyone had binoculars for a closer view. We used tallies to count some of the animals – especially the rainbow lorikeets. A part of our tour was to look at the drains that feed the fresh water into the wetland areas and the nets that catch all of the rubbish, leaf litter and many other items that come into the wetlands when it rains. This showed us the impact of humans on ecosystems and gave us some new ideas for how we need to continue to care for our environments.

After lunch, we explored the waters of the wetlands. Each team used nets, water trays and ice cube trays to collect water, mud, plant bits and any tiny creatures that live in the water. Then we used spoons and pipettes to scoop water into the ice cube trays and carried these inside to the digital microscopes. Using these digital microscopes we could see all of the aquatic macro invertebrates. We used more charts to find out which types of aquatic macro invertebrates lived in these waters. We found lots of red worms, water slugs and water boatman.

We can’t wait to get back to school and use our new information to help our inquiry investigations.

Our final activity was a bit of a surprise – we went up into a grassland area and build some stick cubby houses or structures. It was a great fun way to finish the day.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to Sally from the Nature Ed Centre, Ann Louise from Urrbrae SS Wetlands classroom and John, Stacey and Alice – the Craigburn Primary parent helpers. Our helpers made sure our day was a great success.

Some more photos of our excursion – thanks Alice for the extras!

What was your favourite part of the day?

Safety Clip

Posted on March 9, 2016 by lisasporn

We are learning about ourselves as learners as a part of our current inquiry topic. A part of our learning includes safety and we’ve used this short clip to give us some safety tips. (We know in Australia that we would dial 000 for help, not 911 as described here).

How do you think this clip helps you to be safe?

Using technology to show our learning

Posted on October 25, 2015 by lisasporn

As a part of our Inquiry into Artefacts we’ve been investigating the changes different items have gone through over the years.

Our class members chose an object and created a timeline to show how and why an object has changed over time. They investigated changes in their chosen object, when the changes happened and how it improved or changed.
Some of the topics were:

swim suits
clothing
airplanes
computers
cars
surfboards
school

This process involved lots of new skills – we’ve used iPads to research the topic and find key dates and facts, we took screenshots of images that were free to use, learnt how to edit and crop an image and publish all of the relevant information and images in iBook Creator.

The students had to work really hard and this research was a lot more challenging than we thought it would be. They worked very hard int teams and shared the workload to create their books.

We shared our iBooks via airplay onto our interactive whiteboard so that the whole class could see our books and provide feedback.

Excursion to Tailem Town

Posted on September 9, 2015 by lisasporn

Our current unit of inquiry is called ‘History through artefacts.’ We are investigating how objects have changed over time and how this impacts our lives.

Today, we travelled by bus to an old pioneer village called Old Tailem Town to look how people lived in the past (olden days). We walked all around the village and looked closely at the houses, rooms, tools, old vehicles like cars, trucks, farm machinery, carts and all of the different businesses you have in a pioneer town, like a bakery, church, town hall, old cinema, car garage, dentist, hospital, news agents, train station, green grocers, butcher and many many more!

We got a really good understanding of how people lived in the “olden days” and how tough their lives were compared to ours now. It was very interesting to see all of the different objects and materials they used or owned. We’re looking forward to using our new understandings back at school for different activities.

A highlight of the day was our ‘school lesson’ with Mr Squires. Our classes had to line up in 2 lines for an outside assembly. Then we were inspected by teachers to make sure the laces were tied on our shoes and our hands were clean. We sang God Save the Queen and then marched into the classroom. We sat at our old school desks as Mr Squires explained how school worked in the past – with ink wells, the cane, special school bags or satchels, slates to write on and Primmers to read.

We’d like to say a big ‘thank you’ to our parent helpers – Julie, Tracy and Chelsea. It was great to have you helping us during the day.

Well done to the people who dressed up to fit in with our ‘olden days’ topic – you all looked great.

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