Week 3

This week both classes headed down to UCOL to participate in a tutorial on the brain...... including a brain dissection!! We visited UCOL a few years back when we were studying SYSTEMS to perform a heart dissection. It was such valuable learning for the ODC students, I just knew we had to head back there again for our study on the brain. Thanks so much to Trish who welcomed us, once again, into her lab. She treated us like she would any of her nursing students and gave the ODC students a taste of what tertiary education is like....even though for some that is a looooong way off!! I am going to put a mish
mosh of pictures up. Click on them to enlarge.























See if your child can identify the following from the picture above and explain its function.
Parietal Lobe, Amygdola, Frontal Lobe, Optical Lobe, Temperal Lobe, Pituitary Gland, celrebellum, Spinal Cord, Pons, Thalamus, Hypothalamus, Mid Brain. It was quite hard to find these parts in our wee sheeps brain, but the children did a pretty awesome job at looking. I think everyone found the pituitary gland. The saying of the day was..."You have broken my amygdola" ask your child why!!

After saying goodbye, it was back to ODC for talent.







Tuesday and Wednesday Readers/writers Club running through their lines with Micheal Wilson. Tuesday will be performing A Midsummer Night's Dream and Wednesday will be performing McBeth.







Tom is doing cartooning for exploring talents. he needs to create a "beginners guide to cartooning" booklet. Here he is doing some research, looking up examples of cartoon characters.








Naomi -Rose is looking up Piet Mondrain. Here she is researching his artistic style. She will then create her own artwork based on his style.


This afternoon I introduced the children to The Ignorance Map. Ignorance logging is attributed to Dr Marylis Witte, a surgery professor at the University of Arizona. She wanted medical students to understand that what is unknown about diseases far outweighs what is known. This resulted in students formulating questions about what they did not know.This technique has been modified and developed into a useful thinking tool.



It is said that any question could fall into at least one of the categories above. We discussed examples of the types of questions that would fall under these headings. When we Iglog, or do an inquiry, we usually ask known unknown questions. Today we wrote known unknown questions to do with the brain. In otherwords, what do we know we don't know, but want to find out?

We used 2 questioning tools to help us generate known unknown questions; The Question Matrix and The Key Words to unlock Big Ideas









A group of children from Tuesday Class using The Question Matrix and The Key Words to Unlock Big Ideas questioning tools while logging their ignorance on the brain.

Here are some of our questions;
Why are humans so smart?
Does your brain grow?
How can your brain keep all the information?
What controls the brain?
How does a brain send messages to your body so fast?
Do you need to exercise your brain?
Why are female, male and animal brains so different?
Why is the size of brains different but the structure is the same?
Is mind readig actually possible?
How does the brain think?
Why is your brain in your head and not in your feet?
What keeps the brain going?
Why is it that the optic lobe is at the back of your brain and your eyes at the front?
Do animal brains and human brains have different parts?
When is your brain at its finest?
Who created the names of the brain parts?
What makes human brains more advanced than other species?
Are there any useless parts of the brain?
If you lose a body part, what happens to the part of the brain that controls that body part?
What is the largest part of the brain and what is its purpose?
What will be the next big achievement in nurosurgery?
How many nurons are there in the brain?
How is it that human brains have evolved over thousands of years while other creatures have stayed the same?
What will our brains look like in 1,000,000,000?
Are animlas dumber than us because their brains are smaller?


An finally, here is a picture of Gallagher and his experiment he shared for headspace last week. He saw it on mythbusters. If you place 1 page of a phone book between another page of another phone book, and repeat it until all the pages are on top of each other, it is physically impossible to pull the two books apart!! Even (apparently) with tanks!










Gallagher's two phone books. It took quite awhile to place the pages in the correct place!







Grace and Gallagher trying to pull the two books apart!


IMPOSSIBLE

Week 1

We began our first session of Term 2 with some creative thinking. For this session the children
had 10 minutes to draw for me a CROCODOODLEBUGGABOO.....a what you say?? The creative juices began flowing immediately with this one!! Once the 10 minutes were up, they then had 5 minutes to elaborate their ideas by adding detail, labels and distinguishing features. They also had to describe their character. Creative Thinking is all about flexibility, fluency and elaboration.

Here are some examples...


















Judah decided that a Crocodoodlebuggaboo wasn't a thing, but a place. Here is the land of Crocodoodlebuggaboo.








For Affective this term we are unpacking 2 'experts' ideas on Giftedness. Joseph Renzulli and his 3-Ringed model and Francoys Gagne's Differientated Model on Giftedness and talent. We began today though by discussing what we thought giftedness was and what it 'looks' like. I got everyone to draw a picture of how they think other people see gifted people and it was interesting to see that many of them drew boys or girls with glasses.

I then asked them to write their thoughts on what gifteness is. I was going to type some up, but some of them are quite personal. Ask your child what they think it means to be gifted.

This afternoon we got right in to THE BRAIN!!! In 2 weeks we are heading to UCOL for a dissection, so we need to know lots before we get there!!
We had 4 activities to complete as a bus stop rotation.
1. Read, read, read!!! What interesting things can you find out about the brain?? The children had the choice whether to write interesting info down or to just read. Wednesday Class also got to look at an awesome 3-D brain puzzle and a pop out book on the brain.











2. Brain Word Glossery. The children to find out the meanings of the following words. I am in the middle of typing them all up for our Discovery Topic Board!
axon, basal ganglia, brain stem, cerebellum, dendrite, cortex, cerebrum, frontal lobe, glial celis, memory, mind, myelin, neuron, occipital lobe, parietal lobe. Some very tricky words indeed!










3. Visual Brain. Using plastercine and reference books, the children had to create a model of a brain, and then label all the parts. I will post pictures of these next week, as not many were completed.










4. MENSA. The children visited the MENSA website and found out what MENSA was and who could join. They then had a go at the Mensa Workout. To try the workout visit tehir website.
http://www.mensa.org











Keep those brain facts coming on our wall wisher!! They are very interesting to read.

http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/7IHkoi7gQS