We were right back into it this morning. We began our day with the introduction to CRITICAL THINKING. What is critical thinking? For success in the 21st century...in fact, all centuries? it's important to be critical thinkers. We had an interesting discussion on what we thought critical thinking meant. I was quite impressed with the children's initial ideas. We the move on to our new learning tool; depth and complexity cards . This learning tool was developed by Sandra Kaplan and it helps us to go beyond the facts and look at subject matter in more depth. We used some of the Depth and Complexity icons to answer questions about ourselves.........
We have begun our context study on Cultural Patterns. What fun we had with this this morning! I created mini posters of various cultural patterns. The first task was to just look at them and talk about what we could see.
Here we are discussing the various patterns and using 'The Language of the Discipline' to identify the classes of patterns.
We then used the Classes of Patterns in Visual art (Which matches our Depth and Complexity card; Language of the Discipline) to identify the various patterns used within the cultures. We used words like; mosaic, spiral, meander, lattice and symmetry to describe the patterns.
Our next task was to identify the cultures and add the correct label to them. Some were tricky to identify, but we used our past knowledge (Habits of Mind) to identify the cultures we knew. For example we knew that dragons were significant with the Chinese culture, so we could easily identify that one. Other easy identifiable ones were; Russian (because Victorya had talked to us about Russian Dolls and Russian art before) Maori, Polynesian, Aboriginal and Celtic. Jack knew a lot about the Celtic patterns and shared with us about the Celtic symbol for peace and how they used to take the hair from a dead king and use it to make knots.
After much discussion over that, we then discussed ways we could group these patterns. We came up with; colour, complexity, geometric shapes, geography. We had fun classifying them geographically! For some it was a real test of our geography knowledge!
Matching the labels to the cultural patterns. We used The Habits of Mind 'Drawing on Past Knowledge' to help us work this task out.
We continued on with our Talent Clubs after Russian.
The writers were busy publishing, the ICT group were working through Alice Animation tasks and the Maths group began Mathsmate.
Jack working through his Alice task....... to create a scene where 2 characters shake hands. One is so strong they lift the other in the air.
Regan and Rhemus working through their mathsmate.
Kyra publishing her poem.
This afternoon we played chess.
Here are our chess goals for this term
And finally ....here is our Pattern wall all finished!! It looks great!
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