What's Old is New Again!

I wonder if wandering through antique or collectibles shops is a fascination you're able to develop with age? It seems to me that people either love doing it - and always have - or hate it with a passion.  I'm lucky that my husband loves it as I do. (Or I made a good choice, either way.)  We have a few local stores to whom we willingly (and regularly) hand over our time and money.  It's a rare visit that I leave without finding something: whether an antique spoon or tea-cup (I collect both), a quirky book from the early 1900's (my husband collects those) or some ephemera to use in my Way Back Wednesday lessons.

Today was a little different. Today I found books for for ME. Well, for school but that's kinda the same thing right? 

The first pair are from 1955.  One is called The Ideal Book for Boys while the other is The Bumper Book for Girls. I haven't quite decided how I will use these yet.  Having skim read the stories I will probably ask the kiddos to work in groups and give each group a copy of one story from each book.  The language used, and the gender stereotyping is vastly different to the texts the kiddos currently read so after some initial analysis I'll also provide contemporary stories to compare and contrast.  The Australian Curriculum is quite explicit in asking for this kind of analysis, and the gender concepts that will be discussed will support many of the ideas behind our single gender programmes (e.g. boys don't have to be physically strong to have strength). 

The other three are from a 1960 Science Service series and are called Earth, Maps & Mapping and Crime Detection. These little gems will be used as part of our Science as a Human Endeavour learning about how scientific knowledge changes over time, and how science influences human interaction with each other and with Earth.  Oh boy are they perfect examples of how scientific knowledge has changed over time. In Crime Detection the 'hair & fiber' section makes no mention of DNA; in Maps & Mapping electronic computers are lauded as having brought much nearer the realisation of the dream of a truly accurate triangulation network of the entire world; in Earth we can learn of the world's smallest TV camera which is the size of a flashlight. 

 Some things never change though. 

"It seems  - but has by no means been proven - that the earth is getting warmer." (Earth)

What artefacts or ephemera do you bring into your learning spaces?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it.
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.

Learning about Learning Science

A learning space at ASMS

Another one of the opportunities I've taken this year has been a 5 day course about teaching science in the upper primary years. The course was co-run by the amazing Australian Science and Mathematics School (ASMS) and the Department of Education and Child Development. The ASMS is a senior high school based at Flinders University of South Australia  (my alma mater - woot woot) and which, clearly from its name, focusses on Science and Maths ed. The school is right on the FUSA campus and has amazing learning spaces. Everytime we went there I came away just buzzing with ideas for our learning spaces.

Anyway… I digress.  (Something new? Not.)    The course was open (through application) to teachers of year 6 and/or 7. Preference was given to applicants who applied in tandem or groups of teachers from one school. I applied with two of the other teachers from my unit and we were all successful. The course was taught by staff from the ASMS and focussed on the Australian Curriculum strand of Science as a Human Endeavour  and developing participants' skills in teaching from an inquiry position. Much of our time was spent learning through activity: plenty of 'take home' hands-on learning experiences.  You can imagine how the little groups of teachers from different schools all buzzed with ideas building on each activity. I've no idea how the trainers managed to get through everything on their agenda - we were a rather rowdy class!

The structure that the trainers were keen to impress upon us as best practice is one that I remember well from uni: the 5Es Teaching and Learning Model.  Have you ever used it?  It's a strong scaffold around which to build a learning progression.

• Engage: capture students' interest and activate prior knowledge.
• Explore: hands on activities that are student directed and force them to collaboratively wrestle with a new problem or set of ideas. 
• Explain: teacher provides conceptual clarification for ideas developed during the exploration. Important that this happens after the exploration, but it's ok to cycle back and forth between the two.
• Elaborate: collaborative application of new knowledge.
• Evaluate: review; evidence of learning.

It's important to remember too that each stage in this progression can, indeed should, have assessment built in - either for, of or as learning.  Hearing a broad range of assessment methods was thought provoking. And a little affirming. Our team all uses a really broad range of assessment strategies across for, of and as learning. My commitment to action from that session: get students to self and authentically peer assess much more often than I currently do.

The next part of the course involved developing an inquiry unit of teaching and learning to deliver to our classes. We then came back together to discuss our progress. Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret that I'm sure my colleagues won't mind me sharing… We came up with the draft of our unit in about an hour.

A big part of our hour was spent formatting this pro forma. Shhhh!

And then finished putting together the unit in another hour AND then taught the majority of it in two days. (They were full days - dedicated to science.) It's not ideal but you know what? We learnt a lot about how we need NOT to plan in future and the four classes in our unit  learnt a LOT about electrical circuits. It might have seemed like it was a rush job to put together and teach but I think a more accurate description is that we pulled together as a team and worked incredibly well and incredibly collaboratively.

The five day course was an interesting process for me. Occasionally I felt a little frustrated because the 5E model was presented almost like a new concept and it's not. (Certainly not to anyone who's finished uni in the past 5 years.)  However, looking around the room I remembered that most of the people there finished before then although most of them had worked with the model before anyway. I guess it was my expectation that I'd learn more NEW models? That being said it was a good chance to review the model.

I enjoyed looking at science (as a subject) through the lens of the Science as a Human Endeavour strand. I don't think many of us do it very well yet. I certainly don't. It comes across in various aspects of my programme but rarely as part of my science programme. I need to work on that.  

Stay tuned for a wrap up of our unit of teaching and learning about electrical circuits.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 5 Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning

Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

(Is there someway I can pull a standard 4 out of this and go for a full house?)

Shooting for the stars Mach 2.

Some of you may remember that I taught a unit of work about space to a group of reception children last year. I loved it. They loved it. Happy dances all around.  (If you can't remember, or never read about it, you can here.) Since then I've put together a much more involved grade 5 unit of work on space and have pinned about 9 gazillion awesome space resources (they're spread through my Classroom Coolness: Science board if you're interested). I've also revisited my reception unit of work with another class.

Let me set the scene: towards the end of the third week of a four week contract, in another reception class, the students were using their bodies to make letter shapes and I was using my tablet to capture their attempts. The students reviewed the photos and modified their letters as they saw fit. Being five years old these students were, naturally, curious to see the other photos on my tablet and so they stumbled upon the photos of my first space unit*. (Remember those cool photos of the children creating a solar system with their bodies? That's what piqued my class' interest.) 

"Why did you teach them about space? When are you going to teach us?"

Well there's actually no answer to those questions that are acceptable to most 5 year olds!  We had one more week together and no pre-arranged commitments so I threw caution (and my plans) into the wind and announced that the following week was to be Space Week. 

We completely immersed ourselves in learning about space, becoming space explorers who visited at least two planets a day. We read, wrote and drew about stars and planets. We created art work and made human models of the solar system. It was, like last time, a fantastic experience.  

How was it different to last time?

1. We concentrated on Space (to the exclusion of everything else) for one week instead of focusing on it for a session a day over four weeks. There are advantages to both, but I understand that this way is certainly not often possible or desirable.
2. The students were much younger (mostly in their first (or second for a couple) term of reception) and so relied more heavily on me for guidance with their writing. 
3. The prior knowledge was much lower, so I started very differently. I used a community of inquiry approach to determining the prior knowledge. The students LOVED this experience because I talked it up as something that we, as teachers, use to share our understanding. They really stepped up to the plate and made sure their contributions were well considered. (If you've never used the community of inquiry method, here's a good place to check it out.)



Our inflatable solar system.

4. I approached the learning from a narrative perspective. Each day we climbed inside our space ship, put on our space helmets, buckled our belts etc., before zooming off to the next planet. I hung an inflatable solar system in our room so that we knew which planet we were looking for each trip. As we pulled up our space ship we made observations about what we imagined we could see and record these. We compared our observations with recorded information on posters, in books and on websites. We were often surprised at what we learned in these comparisons.
5. There was less writing (although we wrote plenty - more than for the whole other three weeks put together!) and more art. These children LOVED their art. Check out some of these amazing solar systems they created.
   
   And some of the wall hangings:
   
   
   
6. We went outside to create our solar system rather than drew it on the carpet. (Don't get me wrong: using chalk on the carpet is an amazing use of a very under-utilised space and we did loads of carpet drawing in this particular class BUT it was a sunny day so we went outside. Where better to pretend to be the sun than out in the sunshine?)
7. Our leadership team bought into our explorations and often popped into the classroom to see which planet we were visiting. The children LOVED sharing their learning and showing off how much they'd learnt. (I loved watching them share their learning and showing off how much they'd learnt EVEN more than they enjoyed doing it.)
8. We were able to share our learning with the other junior primary classes who all came to see our space journals, solar system hats, solar system wall hangings and art during one big exposition on the final day. Boy were we proud!

So, whilst it felt a little like I was cheating (because I was able to recycle a bunch of my resources and planning) my second space unit was really quite different.  I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to teach an older group about some space related topic. It's such a fun topic!

How do you teach about the solar system and space?

*I only use my tablet at school and am very careful around which photos remain accessible in this way.

Developments.

The start of this school year was one of quite some developments in this household. Our eldest child started high school and our youngest child started kindergarten and I... Well. I started nothing. Actually, that's a lie. I just didn't start the school year with a class like I'd hoped to do.

I have, however, started working on a project with my dear friend AJ.  AJ and I met rather fortuitously at the orientation day for our kids' high school and then a couple of days later in a classroom on my second day of teaching. She's been around to see me stumble travel through my first few months of teaching, including six weeks during which she was my friend AND the parent of one of my students. (And she's still my friend!) We discovered that we work well together and our learning styles mesh well. So, we've decided that we should put our combined super-powers (mwa ha ha!) to good use.  

Having both experienced firsthand the challenge of parenting gifted children and noting the likelihood of that particular special need being addressed by most schools our initial goal was to look into developing a gifted programme that could be easily implemented. We're not ambitious at all!

We've kept that overriding goal in mind, but our practical efforts have become quite directed at the planning process for developing units of work. 

• How do we plan? 
• What should a unit plan look like? 
• What should a unit plan include? 
• How can we make the most of the hard work we - as individual teachers - put into these plans?

If you've not read this book... READ IT NOW! 

In looking to bring some clarity to our thinking we've both been somewhat captured by the ideas of McTighe & Wiggins in Understanding by Design.  

(In a super simplified nutshell: start with the desired understandings and plan your assessment tools first. Plan whatever learning activities you will need in order to help your students reach the understandings you identified at the beginning.)

We're reading quite widely on the planning process and most recently AJ has been looking at the International Baccalaureate process. 

Alongside the reading, we're trying to act on our findings. I've put together a unit of work that addresses the Earth & Space Sciences substrand of the Year 5 Australian National Science curriculum, while AJ has worked on one for the Biological Sciences substrand for Year 4. It's fascinating to see the different approaches we've taken considering we're working within essentially the same planning framework. 

Working independently but collaboratively; this is how I imagined the profession of teaching to be. I'm so pleased I've found a collaborative teammate and that we live in the time of such wonderful tools as Dropbox, Symbaloo and Blackboard Collaborate (not to mention the considerable communication we engage in over Facebook). I'm also really pleased that we're both working in classrooms again. (AJ has a contract and I'm doing more relieving than I thought likely at this time of year.) Our project may not be the fastest moving creation in the word but it's certainly valuable in helping us develop and maintain our professional practice standards.

I'm curious to hear... How do other teachers plan?  

Possible (if not overly successful) cycles of life

Our science topic to finish off the year was life cycles.  The curriculum standard says 'living things have life cycles' which is pretty explicit wonderfully broad and allowed for plenty of creativity in our classroom learning programme. We looked at both a conceptual understanding of life cycles and an experiential understanding with several live examples in the classroom.

Our investigation took us from the ubiquitous butterfly through silkworms, frogs, chickens and humans to peas, beans and sunflowers. We drew life cycles, we labelled life cycles, we wrote about life cycles, we created life cycle art and we observed life cycles.

We tried to hatch silkworms from eggs. Tried. And for about three hours were mildly successful: three eggs hatched and for a very brief period we were able to watch the tiniest caterpillars any of us had ever seen munch away (on the mulberry leaves my husband delivered upon taking my frantic "one's hatched!" phone call) before they curled up and dropped off the mortal coil.  Whilst not the most effective of demonstrations in terms of life cycles, it was a great opportunity to discuss science as a human endeavour and the scientific inquiry process. Not all experiments succeed - and that outcome is, in itself, a result to be analysed and evaluated.

For some reason everyone loved handling them.
Kinda creeped me out though!

We also kept mealworms, with limited success. My research lead me to believe that mealworms are SUPER EASY to keep and will change into meal beetles within three weeks. They are, but they didn't. Term finished a week ago but I'm still waiting. If you live in Adelaide and want to go fishing anytime soon, look me up: I've got bait for you!






It wasn't all doom and gloom though. One of the other classes in our school was incubating chicken eggs. We kept track of those and were there to see the chicks the day they hatched.

Planting the peas.

We planted peas and whilst didn't have time to watch them through to flowering, we did watch them right through germination.

We planted the peas in empty CD cases. As they germinated we were able to see both the roots as they moved downwards and the shoots as they grew upwards.We set them in the window to grow, the case acted as a mini glasshouse and we saw AMAZINGLY quick growth.

The children took great pride in the growth of 'their' pea and went to great efforts to keep them watered. (Removing the CD insert leaves a narrow empty band on one side of the case which enables watering with a pipette/syringe.)

Looking out of our window.

Looking in our window.

Day 1.

Watering

Day 21.

Check out this pin to see where I found the idea.  (Loooove Pinterest!)

The culminating activities for this unit of work were a double page spread magazine article (for a local science magazine for children) and a whole class game show. I have to say... I think I learnt almost as much about life cycles as the children did.