City Circle Loop signage, Museum Station, Sydney, NSW.
A Flickr slideshow about Museum Station, Sydney, is HERE. Stage 2 students are researching underground railway systems as part of their science and technology unit, Buildings and Bridges.
And on through the underground stations (and Circular Quay) of Sydney’s City Circle Loop:
City Circle hi def hi speed
The Teachers’ notes I wrote for Wilkins Farago Publishing are now online. I hope lots of school libraries buy their own copy of the picture book, One red shoe, and get good use out of it!
The notes can be downloaded as a PDF here.
When I was testing the book out with our Stage 3 students, even the Stage 2 students were intrigued, although they only really discussed the red symbolism throughout, not the stronger themes about war/unrest in the Gaza Strip, but they came up with this digital slideshow:
As a component of Stage 2’s science & technology investigations into Buildings & Bridges, we will be learning about ancient structures in the library.
1 The Great Pyramid of Egypt, how it was built – new solid theory, new evidence. JP Houdin. 2011
Why did we stop building pyramids?
Lost temples: Mayan pyramids of Chichen Itza
Athens Acropolis and the Parthenon
Rome, Italy: The Colosseum
The lost city of Pompeii
Ancientvine – Virtual Roman house 3D reconstruction
Stonehenge prehistoric monument
Hadrian’s Wall
Everything you need to know about the Great Wall of China
In their HSIE unit, British colonisation of Australia, Stage 2 students are investigating four different travel routes to Australia from Britain:
ROUTE TAKEN BY COOK (via Tahiti)
Plymouth (August 1768), rounded Cape Horn, Tahiti (observe transit of Venus), Pacific Islands of Huahine, Borabora and Raiatea (all claimed for Britain), unsuccessfully attempted to land at Rurutu, then New Zealand, then Botany Bay, then north along Australian east coast, then Batavia in Dutch East Indies, rounded Cape of Good Hope, then arriving at Deal in Britain (July 1771, almost three years later).
The first voyage of James Cook
ROUTE TAKEN BY FIRST FLEET (via Cape Town)
Portsmouth (May 1787), Rio de Janiero, Cape Town, through Great Southern Ocean to Botany Bay (January 1788), then Sydney Cove, Port Jackson.
First Fleet – Behind the news
BRITAIN TO AUSTRALIA via SUEZ CANAL (1900-20s)
Britain, Port Said (in Egypt), Port Aden (in Yemen), Colombo (Ceylon, now Sri Lanka), Fremantle, Melbourne, Sydney.
Suez Canal time lapse mp.4
THE KANGAROO ROUTE
In 1935, the route from London to Brisbane had taken 12.5 days, which included a rail trip between Paris and Brindisi. QANTAS first flew the route in 1947, from Sydney to London, with stopovers in Darwin, Singapore (overnight), Calcutta, Karachi, Cairo (overnight) and Tripoli. Return fare was £585 = 130 weeks x average wage.
In 1960, fastest trip was 34 h 30 min with eight stops. In 1989, QANTAS set a world distance record for commercial jets when a Boeing 747-400 flew non-stop, London to Sydney, in just over 20 hours. From 2012, all QANTAS services began making Sydney-London stopovers in Dubai.
The longest hop – Qantas’ Kangaroo Route
Class 3/4L recently had an extra session in the school library, so we decided to create a digital slideshow, inspired by the powerful cover art of the new picture book, One red shoe, by Karin Gruss & Tobias Krejtschi (Wikins Farago, 2014). The book, set in the war-torn Gaza Strip, features black and white illustrations through, with the dramatic use of spot colour on a US-style, Chuck Taylor All-Stars red canvas shoe, to persuade the readers and viewers with symbolism.
Surrounded by RED
The resulting, jointly-constructed text of this digital slideshow, created during a Circle Time brainstorming session, is quite reminiscent of the colour poems featured in the now-classic book, Hailstones and halibut bones by Mary O’Neill (1961), although the students were not exposed to that particular work. Yet. Red objects featured in the images came mainly from the school library environment, but also a few from my personal digital albums.
Download free Teachers’ notes for One red shoe.
These video clips of Australian maps will enhance the lessons in which Stage 2 students invesigate Australia’s location on the world globe for their HSIE unit, British colonisation of Australia:
World map – Australia & Oceania
Australia’s geographic challenge
Despite the Equadorian slant and the misspellings of “Arctic” and “Antarctic”, this short presentation is a useful summary of information (“Equator”, “hemisphere”, “northern”, “southern”, “climate”, “temperature”, etc) already covered in HSIE lessons with Stage 2. It also introduces the terms “precipitation”, “tropical zone”, “temperate zone” and the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
Climatic Zone – Logos Academy
K-6PR created these murals yesterday on the IWB. Their current theme is “Sea creatures”.
Stage 2 group:
Once upon a time, there was a mermaid. She was looking in her mirror to put on lipstick. A shark came to eat the fish swimming around her. The mermaid could see the shark behind her in the mirror.
The man caught a fish on his fishing rod. The man saw a dolphin jumping high. It was going up and down.
The crab is finding a pearl in the clam.
The whale is coming up out of the ocean to spray water out of his blowhole.
The seahorses were watching the shark chase the fish. They were hiding in the seaweed because they didn’t want to get eaten too.
Stage 1 group:
The whale can move through the water by swishing his tail. It is looking for krill to eat.
The shark is swimming and wants to eat the turtle. The turtle is on the beach so he can be safe. He wants to go into the water to find food but he is scared of the shark.
The dolphin wants to make friends with the clownfish.
The crabs are digging lots of holes in the sand because it is time for bed.
The mermaid is cuddling a fish because he is her friend. The sunblock on the beach belongs to the mermaid. She uses it when she comes out of the water and her magical tail has turned into legs.
Early Stage 1 group:
We can see a whale.
We can see a mermaid putting on her lipstick. She has a fish tail instead of legs.
We can see a fish with bubbles coming out of his mouth. There are five orange fish blowing bubbles.
We can see a dolphin swimming.
We can see some crabs swimming in the water. They are playing “Hide and Seek”.
We can see two fish swimming together.
The eel is chasing the fish because he wants to eat them.
The fat dolphin wants to eat the fish.
The blue fish is in a bowl.
Stage 3 group:
Once upon a time there was a shiver of sharks. The sharks wanted to attack a seal because they were hungry. This is why the seal looks so worried.
Meanwhile, a dolphin was swimming towards a catfish. He was going to teach the catfish how to jump. This was so the catfish could get away from the sharks.
The crab was planning to use his nippers to catch the seahorse’s tail. The seahorse wants to make friends with the catfish.
The sea turtle is swimming towards the shallow water where the sun is shining through. She is ready to lay her eggs in the sand.
COLLECTIVE NOUNS:
When we were writing the above story we needed a collective noun for a group of sharks. We read that it could be a school, a shoal, a pack or a shiver of sharks. Here are some more interesting collective nouns:
A cast of crabs.
A pod of dolphins.
A school or shoal of fish.
A gam of whales.
A bale of turtles.
A bob of seals.
Here is a new PhotoPeach digital slideshow which archives some of the photos and craftwork of this year’s K-2 Chinese New Year celebrations:
Year of the Horse at Penrith PS
The inclement weather on Friday gave Class 1HB an additional lesson in the school library, so we brought out the collection of puppets and brainstormed a new digital story:
A lemur’s tale
This digital story is especially for author Meredith Costain, with many thanks for sending Penrith Public School the signed copy of her wonderful new picture book, My first day at school (Windy Hollow Books, 2013). The book’s illustrations are by Michelle Macintosh.
Stage 3 students have recently been working as “buddies” for Kindergarten Orientation, and they enjoyed having Meredith’s book read to them in a library session, and then reminiscing, brainstorming, storyboarding, photographing, and suggesting possible text for a joint construction to create a PhotoPeach presentation. We anticipate our incoming Kindergarten students, future buddies and staff and students at other schools to get some useful tips from it.
Special thanks to Ms Stockton, who allowed Robbie Rules – our oldest “student” at Penrith PS, who’s never graduated from Stage 1 – to visit the library for the last few weeks of Term 4, 2013.
Robbie Rules: My first day at school