Last week, I was lucky enough to speak to a large group of prospective teachers at ‘EdFest 2012’ at the University of Western Sydney. While I couldn’t take the class to New South Wales with me, I did the next best thing and filmed them giving their advice to the next generation of teachers. Hope you enjoy it.
Please leave us a comment and tell us what you think!
I bought myself a great new tee-shirt the other day — It had a a ‘Rube Goldberg machine’ on the front. For those of you who don’t know, Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist who was famous for designing ridiculously complex machines to achieve a simple goal. Perhaps you have seen this famous Honda commercial:
As an optional homework activity this week, I am encouraging students to have a go at designing their own Rube Goldberg machine. It won’t be anything like the Honda machine, but it will be a lot of fun.
Students have the option of creating a purely imaginary machine (i.e. one that exists only on paper). Alternatively, they could have a go at designing a real machine. If they want to design a real machine, have a look at the ABC’s Surfing Scientist for ideas.
Rube Goldberg machines exist at the intersection of science, creativity and plain silliness. I look forward to seeing what the kids come up with. Videos of successful machines will be posted here for all to see.
For students who choose to accept the challenge, the homework is due Monday 19 March.
Tee-shirt design by Jim Gray.
Today in LA31 Mr Fuller read us a book it was called “7 Habits”. We learnt a new habit today. The habit is ” First Things First”. This means people should focus on the important things in their life like their family, jobs and friends. Then you have the distraction in your life like TV, video games, your hair and your nails etc. Mr Fuller showed us a video about a lady who was given a challenge to put big rocks (representing important things in life) and small rocks (representing small things like television).
So far this year we have made magazine articles for our future job interests, we also made Y charts showing what our class vision is and we also decorated our class with our name artwork.
Here are some examples of our work so far: First Things First By Lachlan and First Things First by Liana.
29.2.12
Today we had sport,art and science.For sport we played volleyball we got into teams and there was 4 teams we vs every team and Mr P was watching and assessing us. It was lots of fun.After sport we had art. In art we did graffiti writing of our names.We coloured in our drafts and some people got up to colouring in their good copy on a A3 piece of paper.
After recess we had science with Mrs Harman we read a story of Anton van Leeuwenhoek and we highlighted the key words.After that we talked about the key words and then we wrote a a paragraph of they keywords we highlighted then it was finally lunch.
After lunch we did more science with Mrs Harman just talking about our paragraphs.
1.3.12
Today we did filming for Mr Fuller because he is going to Sydney and talking to all the new teachers. For our filming we are talking about all this different things for the new teachers to know so their class can be as happy as ours!! We had to be very quiet and patient during the filming time. We had big cue cards so we could read and look at the camera at the same time. We had a buddy that would hold up our cards.The filming worked out well.
Also today we met up with our buddy class. It was great fun meeting the year 3s. We read a book to them and they had a chance to read as well. Our buddy class was LA20 Miss Currie. After we all read a book Mr Fuller read The Fabulous Flying Books of Morris Lessmore on his iPad. After all that our cute little buddies went back to class.
By Madi and Vanessa
LA31 class blog 