+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.
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.