Alongside the bottle ecosystems we introduce our students to the various concepts associated with ecology. This allows them to discuss biotic and abiotic, food webs, other relationships such as mutualism and terms such as producers and consumers. They have time to practice and apply this learning and then apply it to an ecosystem of choice (they chose and animal from our local zoo). They apply their learning by creating an ecosystem interactive poster. We trialled this last year and it worked quite well both as a way for students to communicate their learning and as a motivator. This year we’re doing it with all the year 9 classes at once. This is to fit in with the HASS classes as we run the unit in a small cross curricula manner.
This was quite a problem with resources which we barely coped with and will lead to some changes both to our organisation but also towards creating a maker space in our learning hub as checking the return of equipment proved near impossible for all of us involved.
However the posters produced by my two classes this year are on the whole better than last years and I’ll post some examples below.
Things to remember
Have equipment in a manner that is easy to check turn – might be better to allocate certain sets to certain tables and the table is responsible for the return. That works in Science labs but I have more control over students exiting than in the open spaces of the hub so we’ll have to develop responsibility – give them the same equipment each time, if it’s not returned correctly they lose access to it.
showing examples worked well. I should probably go through images of previous years in more detail and repeat it a couple of times.
Being explicit about what goes on the poster each session worked well at the start and kept most of the class up to date but as soon as students start to miss lessons compromises spread.
Make a bigger emphasis that the poster isn’ t about the animal but about the animal’s ecosystem.

The above photos are from one class the other is still to be assessed.

For the last two years my year 9 Science classes have constructed and observed bottle ecosystems. We cut up 2 2 litre bottles and had the top part as a terrestrial system and the bottom half as an aquatic system. We keep some small fish in the aquatic system. Last year they all survived. This year about half died. This happened quickly and also occurs in the big communal tank I had for the fish, so this was probably due to factors beyond my control. It’s a really motivating activity for the students, which is why the loss of fish was disappointing. Students identified ecological factor, made predictions and follows them through.

+he Hallett Cove excursions (3 groups, 7 classes, 3 days, 1 postponement due to weather) happened. I’ve got lots of the small pieces of art about ecosystems up in my room and am looking for a space to display the timelines. 9C, my Science class went on the last of the trips as we cancelled the first one due to the weather forecast being very hot. We had fun, I think. For most of the day. That was part of the plan. I also got the group I was with to talk to me about the geology and have used several references to the day in class as we learn about plate tectonics. We’ve done a range of different short tasks around this topic – an earthquake drill, a series of volcano demonstrations (I think the sparkler one was the favourite), mapped where earthquakes and volcanic activity took place, use that as an aha moment for plate boundaries, looked at sea floor spreading (paper pulled along a bench while team members coloured furiously with crayons), a small resource based investigation task – which I assessed looking particularly for acknowledging sources appropriately, and finally the production of some stop motion animations. Here are a couple of them.

IMG_0791 IMG_0957

We’ve also seen Richard Hammond’s Journey to the Centre of the Planet and lots of smaller videos to show particular types of volcanoes and plate movements. I use iPods to deliver the information for the students. It worked really well for some of the groups and all groups used it to make some recordings of soundscapes and short videos that explained how some of the features at Hallett Cove occurred.  I have one of the students coming to speak about it at a staff meeting tomorrow. He hasn’t said anything positive yet – hard to see screen, went a little fast, had to keep pausing – I don’t want to suggest anything he might say. I will see if I can get some video of others speaking about the use of iPods before hand.

Unfortunately, despite my year 10 students enjoying the forensics and managing to use the techniques successfully they didn’t do so well in their exam. I think they thought it was a race to see who could finish first. 

Finally got most of my Year 8s to write their essay about rocks – the one they write after their learning to show how much they’ve learned about the rock cycle etc from all the activities and investigations we’d done. Big cheer that all of them discussed the recyclability of rocks – main point. A bit sad about how few went into any depth about the value of rocks.

Week 2 of the term went very smoothly. On Friday the year 8s made volcanic toffees in the demo kitchen and apart from a few hot plates not working the toffees worked well. They connected to obsidian and pumice. This class are making a rock collection although I have only had them tell me how it is going so far.
I did a double lesson on Magnetic fields and electromagnetism. Because of all the lessons missed with this class it’s all I could manage. I used lots of demonstrations of various phenomena to tell the story from magnetic fields to electromotive force. The class have started nuclear and atomic physics with an investigation based on size approximation and a history of the model of the atom (well as far as Heisenberg anyway.
10 Science used piktochart to create a visual presentation about the evolution of an animal. The task asked them to show evidence and any alternative explanations along with their reasons for supporting one of the other.
9 Science Combustion reactions. Burning fuels and designing investigations to measure energy released. The key part was to think of ways to improve on the investigations as we went.
Stage 2 Physics revision of derivations and some of the applications. I think they’re all coming back next week.
Stage 2 Chemistry quizzing on the memory based parts of the course.

Lots of walking around the Hallett Cove Conservation Park. There is a great record of the Adelaide area ancient geological history from around six hundred million years ago. Unfortunately only a tiny fossiliferous layer. So I am organising an excursion for the year nines. I am planning to do the excursion without paper or pen where students get instructions from iPods – so I have to create the videos to do this. Students will do large scale group type tasks at different points on the trail. Putting lots of my imagination into those because they will have to be engaging and organised around small groups. I plan the first groups will go in week 4 next term so I have a few weeks to go.

First session a review of unpacking the Australian Curriculum. We looked at how to organise tasks although lots of unanswered questions in my head and the assessing of a standard/criteria but then doing this at different levels seemed to be a strange fit. However, I need to move on from this we’ve already created tasks and part created our own rubrics. Probably the biggest issue is that tasks need to be necessarily deeper and fewer, this is not a good fit with the quite large proportion of our clientele and their particular attendance patterns. So in actuality need more and smaller tasks….

Literacy / Strategies. Antony Yeats.
Emphasis of time with the student.
Film in the background (not sure about this in a science lab) the idea is to provide a slight distraction. Limits students own distractions.
Guide lines for working through a task.
Suggestion of music as another way … I’ve used on and off, depends on how teacher directed the learning method is at the time.
Grouping strategically – which we do around the task. Provides someone else to give attention.
Streamlining feedback. Generic feedback sheets and rubrics. Highlight comments that applied. Sending out example sheets.

Numeracy..
Where is your dot?
Tamara and Chris.
Nice activity. For creating a need. Example how do you know it is acidic?

The bulk of the day is developing our programmes along aus curriculum.