Sharing Evening 2011

Thanks for a great night everyone! I have had amazing feedback from the many who attended.
Enjoy the pictures.

Introducing.......






The Indus Valley The Mesopotamians










The Romans The Ancient Chinese








The Egyptians The Minoans









The Aztecs The Mayans










The Phoenicians

We have just crashed landed back to 2011 after being sent back in time to investigate how life used to be. Which Ancient Civilization had the best quality of life?






















And the sharing on information begins, so that our community can make an informed choice as to which civilization they'd like to travel back in time to......































And the civilization that our community thought had it right????????

The Romans!! Go the Romans!! I'm sure it had something to do with the amount of public holidays that they had each year!!!

You all did a fantastic job and I am proud of you all!

Week 7 - OPEN DAYS

Thanks everyone for a great couple of days. We had a wonderful time sharing with you some of our regular ODC experiences. It was lovely to see so many parents and grandparents. Thanks to the teachers who took time out of their busy day to come visit too. Here are some pictures celebrating our day.














Critical thinking; using a venn diagram to compare a human brain to a computer










4X4 challenge - The Helium Stick Challenge. As a group lower the stick to the ground. Each person must keep their index fingers on the stick at all times other wise you had to start again. The stick had a mysterious way of floating up in the air! this challenge was way harder than everyone thought it was going to be.









Rehearsing our Shakespeare play with Michael in the lovely winter sun!

Week 6

We welcomed a guest visitor this week; Julia Parker. Julia is a Neurodevelopmental Therapist. Julia assesses developmental milestones of 0 - 5 year olds, identify's strength and problem areas and then provides advice and treatment to help them reach their milestones. Julia works with premature babies (born before 32 weeks) and children with Cerebral Palsy, Downs Syndrome, Spina Bifida, Autism and unspecified developmental delay.
She began by running through how the brain develops in neutro and then explained the different developmental stages for babies and toddlers. She discussed, amongst other things, the importance of crawling (balance, working left and right side of brain) and why babies cry when you leave the room (They think you won't come back!) She then ran through the Bailey 111 Assessment test, which is the test she performs on her patients to see where their area of need is. I am pleased to say everyone at The ODC passed!!!





Betty made something very special for the Tuesday Class.....tzungtzu, in celebration of the Dragon Boat Festival that happens on the 5 th day of the 5th month....on the Chinese calendar.

Most people gave it a try. I did and thought it was delicious! This tasty dish consists of rice dumplings with meat and peanuts. It is then wrapped in bamboo leaves and steamed.

















NO Jacqui on Wedne sday, so out came the chess boards!!!

Wednesday's Shakespeare group read through their with scenes from MacBeth, ready for recording next week!

Week 5

Goodness me, we have been busy!! I guess as the old saying goes....time flys when you're having fun.
At The ODC we are always busy, and we always seem to run out of time in the day. The last few weeks have been no acception. We celebrated Bring - a - Buddy Day in Week 4. We have in the past celebrated this time during Term 4, but I believe it is much more beneficial having it earlier. Makes sense really; I'm not sure why we haven't done it earlier before? Unfortunately there are no pictures to share of our Bring - a - Buddy Day, as I don't have permission from our visitor's parents! Will add this to the permission slip for next year.










Yeah!! We finally got our brain models completed!! We had to use plastercine and reference books to identify the different areas of the brain. We then needed to explain the different functions. We used 'language of the Discipline'( Depth and Complexity Icon) to complete this activity.
In Week 5, we moved away from the anatomy of the brain and investigated how our brains actually work.
Did you know the human brain has 10 billion neurons (this many: 10,000,000,000)Each of these neurons has between 1,000 and 10,000 connections with other neurons, making up to 10 trillion neuron connections possible (this many: 10,000,000,000,000) .
Our first task was to sketch a neuron and label its parts using these words; dendrite, axon, soma and nucleus. We then had to investigate the 4 different types of neurons; Sensory Neurons, Interneurons, Motoneurons and Pyrimidal Cells (receptors) and find out their functions.









Investigating neurons.......

Our final task was to investigate brain waves.....alpha, beta, theta and delta.










This term, as part of our Affective Curriculum, we are talking about what it means to be gifted. We have talked about the fact that there is no one definition on what it means to be gifted, but there are many academics out there who spend their lives studying, researching and then teaching others about it. Over the last few weeks we have been unpacking Joesph Renzulli's 3 Ringed Model.....see above. Renzulli considers three factors important for the development of gifted behaviour: Above average ability, creativity, and task commitment.

Within the above average abilities Renzulli makes a difference between general abilities (like processing information, integrating experiences, and abstract thinking) and specific abilities (like the capacity to acquire knowledge, perform in an activity).

By creativity Renzulli understands the fluency, flexibility, and originality of thought, an openness to experience, sensitivity to stimulations, and a willingness to take risks.

Under task commitment he understands motivation turned into action (like perseverance, endurance, hard work, but also self-confidence, perceptiveness and a special fascination with a special subject). Renzulli argues that without task commitment high achievement is simply not possible.

Only if characteristics from all three rings work together can high achievement or gifted behaviour be witnessed.

Taken from: http://www.gigers.com/matthias/gifted/three_rings.html

Unpacking Renzulli's 3-Ringed Model.

After unpacking Renzulli, we had to identify what fell in the center of the rings and how we showed it.

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