Creating Camps

It's a great novel, if you haven't read it! Holes by Louis Sachar is the story of a young boy who is punished for something he didn't do. Well, punished may be putting it lightly! He is sent to Camp Green Lake, which is in the middle of the desert, to dig holes every single day. It's an adventure story with a lot of interesting themes including friendship, integrity and respect.  

We are currently learning some clever persuasive devices to include in our writing. We have explored rhetorical questions, exaggeration and rule of three so far. The students will be writing their final persuasive text on this thought provoking question:

Does punishment influence behaviour?

As a school which does not have punishments or rewards, I am very interested to read the students responses to this. When we discuss this as a class most students respond to this question at a societal level, believing that 'yes' we do need punishments to influence people. However, at a personal level they feel they do not require punishments in order to do the right thing! Did punishment influence the main character, Stanley- well we just have to keep reading to find out!

Camp Green Lake is the setting for the novel Holes, so we decided to create a model of the camp. It has been a challenge working collaboratively, solving problems, making measurements, considering scale and sourcing appropriate materials. We finished them this week, finally!

The next step is to guide our Sphero around the Camp visit the landmarks and perform some light functions, sound effects and maybe even recorded voices. 

This week we had a practice navigating Sphero around a maze. It looks easy but it is quite a lot of coding behind the scenes. 

The coding is basically a set of instructions for Sphero to follow- how fast, how slow, when to stop, when to turn and perhaps even which angle to turn at. 

It's such a rich learning experience including maths knowledge, technology knowledge and skills and working together to problem solve. 

What pleased me was the students going outside their comfort zone even with their maze design. Many included angles and corners which took time to navigate through. 

So until our maze challenge next week, it's paper, scissors...

The Year 2s That Spoke...

Yes they spoke alright! Today our class had the pleasure of working with Year 2 students who had been reading the book The Papaya That Spoke. As part of the Talk 4 Writing program the Year 2s had learned the actions for the story but they took it one step further than that. They painted some rocks!

Each student was given a set of rocks to paint as a character from the story. They initially used black texta to outline it, paint to colour it and clear gloss to seal it. The Year 6s were genuinely impressed with the quality of their illustration skills.

The Year 2s then used their rocks to re-tell the story. They were brave to tell their stories with such expression, to students much older than themselves.

The next step was to innovate their story, by changing the setting, character, problem or resolution. Two courageous groups were willing to share their new story with the whole class.  

We thoroughly enjoyed their visit and it was terrific to observe the Year 6s in a mentoring role. Until the next storytelling adventure, it's paper, scissors...