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 then moved 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.
Pearl, Emily and Lucy looking at the intricate pattern detail of the selected cultural patterns.
Flynn, Judah and Joey looking for identifying factors within the patterns to see if they can work out which pattern belongs to which culture.
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 some of us knew about Russian Dolls) Maori, Polynesian and Celtic.
We then discussed ways we could group these patterns. We came up with; colour, complexity, straight lines-curved lines, We had fun classifying them geographically! For most of us it was a real test of our geography knowledge!
Phoebe, Megan, Tom and sam adding the labels name labels to the matching cultures.
Adrinna, Libby and Jean grouping their cultural patterns geographically.
For Spanish today we learnt how to sing 'Old MacDonald' and The Maori 'AEIOU' song....but in Spanish. The vowel sounds in Spanish are very similar to the vowel pronounciation in Maori.
We began new talent groups today. The maths group began mathsmate, the writers are publishing thier poems from last term for the book they are collating, Tom began working through tasks using Alice Animation and Joey helped out with publisher today. Next week he will be bringing in his clarinet!! Bring your ear plugs! It's a small classroom!
Everyone was very pleased to see Mr Newton. We read through and discussed our goals for this term before playing each other. Judah very nearly won his game against Mr Newton and Tracey won her second game of chess ever!!!
Our chess goals for this term.
This is our topic board display for PATTERNS. It is very bright abd cheerful.
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