Halfway through the first week back and a lot has happened.

I’m in the process of organising a geology excursion to Hallett Cove Conservation Park. If you haven’t been there, go on a sunny day as it is stunning. Anyway I’m organising the excursion for all the year 9 students and their teachers. It will run without paper and pen task. Instructions will be in the form of a video on the school iPods. Tasks include explaining to teachers, making short videos, using iPad apps, producing art work and generally having a relaxing educational day. I’ve organised excursions that run with iPods before, but this one is huge and has three separate days to cover all the classes.

Tuesday we had a livelink with Professor Brian Cox. Needed some time at school in the holidays to make sure it would all work. The technology didn’t let me down. So about thirty students got to hear him answering questions from students – didn’t manage to get any of my students to put forward a question (perhaps because they didn’t really know who he was). Sonja did most of the supervision as I had a group of year 12s to do exam revision with (a pity as they would have enjoyed the link).

Tuesday night I went to see Professor Cox at the Entertainment Center. Great talk, well organised, good use of video and stills to pace the presentation and I came away feeling that I had learned something that I could pass on to my students. So well worth going. Kirk and Sonja were also there from the Science Faculty. In fact it seemed as though the place was full of Science teachers for a full on (he didn’t cut us any slack on the Physics) two and a half hours. I now have a better grasp of where the multiple universes come from and some ideas about how to present some of the interesting but difficult concepts that come up from time to time.

Today was a very productive day for all my classes :-). Rhoni Mc took my Year 10s through the basics of preparing an infographic through Piktograph. I’d already shown them my attempt for the evolution of rats and most of them signed up with the intent of using the site to produce the visual presentation for their tale of the evolution of a favourite animal – we have snakes, foxes, sloths, komodo dragons and so on. Next up my year 9s enjoyed the short activity about fruit batteries while they were introduced to the idea of chemical reactions that give out energy. Fierce competition ensued and one group scored 0.9 volts which is quite good. Last lesson they were looking at endothermic reactions and we looked at coldpacks, photography and they carried out an endothermic reaction (citric acid and bicarb soda) where the lowest temperature was -12 degrees C. That beat my previous record by 2 degrees. The year 8s started geology and homework is to make a rock collection. Today we looked at the formation of Earth, where do rocks come from? They wrote a starting essay about rocks (I’ll use this to compare with a final essay they write when they have completed their learning on this topic to measure their learning). I also use the essay to teach essay construction skills through a graphic planner.

Why negatives don’t work …
Presented by Adam Voight.
Have to have one things that we’re going to do tomorrow to make Wirreanda a more restorative school.
#restorativewss is the hash tag for twitter.
Inspire
Challenge
Provoke
Strengthen
Connect five non-content intentions.
Start to identify what we are doing that is already restorative.
Have to have small group discussion where we say what we want to achieve today … I hate that.
How you doing? Starting point of restorative practices.
This something that happens really well among Science faculty.

Reflection is the big push so the restorative practice framework can provide explicit practice to reflect upon.

Repairing harm and strengthening relationships.

First principle of fair processes … Engagement– Tell their story. E.g ask the perpetrator first gets them involved in the process.
Principle 2 Explanation why has the decision been made.
Principle 3 Expectation Clarity … Important bit to get right Includes penalties and sanctions that will apply for failing to honour the agreement.
The need for questions to take from past present to future.

Affective statements, affective interaction both at the informal end of the continuum.

Human behaviour

Every behaviour has a meaning and a context …. Get avoid or achieve something. It’s specific to people and situation.
Try strategy with different context. Think about to respond rather than react.
Different type kids
Help Me
Look at Me late, loud and laughing
Make Me power struggle get off the tennis court.
You’ll pay …. Behaviour doesn’t make sense go for the external help.

Change behaviours one at a time not in chunks

Resilient heroes.
Start with the discussion of resilience and then look for heroes who have shown this.
A PD day just about presenting ideas … Works with my learning style.

We entered the analytical chemistry competition and spent Thursday evening with the students doing their titrations.
8 Science finished and presented their findings about whether we could still make some important materials after the Mobile Phone apocalypse. The general consensus was yes.
9 Science collected and examined the micro-organisms living around us. Some were surprised at the amount of life we found and we have now started researching general information about microbes ready to create a Public Service Announcement about a microbe.
10 Science we spent this week watching short videos about the origin of the universe. Each added something slightly different and the students watched them individually while doing some small confirmation tasks around them. We had some good conversations.
11 Physics We didn’t quite get to the end of my plans this term, lots of days missed. We spent this week practising around energy including questions, practicals and finishing issues investigation.

Friday was Brain Dissection Friday with my year 9s … They were sheep brains of course – used to get across the main parts of the brain and carry out a dissection. Class were pretty sensible and used scalpels safely.

The 10s were supposed to complete their demonstration of their learning about the Physics of car crashes by posting on the blog. Next is to assess them.

8s took videos of the demonstrations I did around Physical and Chemical change – they need to get out more. Next week they’ll be carrying out their own chemical investigations.

Stage 1 Physics – optics, ray diagrams, real and virtual images were all concepts and skills we explored this week – the class got a second chance at preparing their practical investigation reports (leaving them to be completed over the holidays failed).

A big week this week.

Year 8 Science class completed their investigations in to “where’s my hover board” by investigating what’s needed to make a board hover – energy, and making and testing their own hover boards. As well as the hands on exploration I also heavily scaffolded it as an investigation report which I’ll be marking before I see them next time. I’m kicking myself for not taking photos – the hover boards hovering on water were a hoot and some of the weird and wonderful ways to make them self powering were interesting.

Year 9 Science class started on a learning menu to allow them to choose what they wanted to learn about the endocrine and nervous systems and how they would show their learning. Still team teaching with Zoe on this. Some of the students have really got into it and will finish their 20 points well ahead of time. We’ll have to make sure they have tried different types of things. At this stage I think we’ve made too many points for most tasks but that will allow most of the students to complete the menu in the time set – nice to start with a success.

Year 10 Science class are doing a two week investigation into some aspect of car safety. It took me all week but I finally have most of the class (some students didn’t attend in the first week) signed up for a blog on this blog – there are some very simple posts below. I will be assessing their learning through the posts we make and will spend more time at the end of each lesson to ensure they put some thought into it and actually reflect on their learning. Next topic is cosmetics.

Year 11 Physics class are now investigating light as a wave, light properties and we’ll end up on optics. I’m pretty close to 3 weeks behind where I was last year through various events so am desperately scrabbling to rearrange, remove, prune etc the topic. In my rush I clearly haven’t scaffolded reports enough for this group as they are still handing in very lazy, half complete investigation reports. I’m giving half the class their last ones back and telling them to do again. Some students didn’t submit the assessment task at all. New videos created and up – Explain Everything is a little tricky to do ray diagrams on. These will be covered in class tutorials as well. By the end the students should be able to make their own astronomical telescope.

Year 12 Physics and Chemistry support group are using most of the time to complete reports and do revision. I provide practice questions and practice tests as well as doing a lot of the interpreting of the assessment rubrics. The tute time is still used well b both groups but there are a couple of students not submitting drafts of their reports to anyone and a couple not being as successful in tests as we’d like so I’m following them up to see what we can do to improve their success.