Whaling. What do you think?

Festivals & Celebrations

Welcome back to another busy term in Room 13!

With all the work we put into our Wearable Art creations and performances last term we ran out of time to complete our inquiry on Festivals and Celebrations.

The beginning of the term sees us jumping right into the inquiry process where will be investigating this big idea:



Can you think of some specific sub-questions that will help us investigate this idea?

Celebrate!

To kick start our Festivals unit last week we got a little crafty!

In groups we had 30 minutes to construct a simple craft from different festivals celebrated around the world. We then shared with everyone the significance of this craft (symbol) with the class.

Using imovie to share information

The movies below are the results of a 2 week project completed by the students in Room 13. Their task was to create a movie using images, voice overs, sound effects and music to share their knowledge they learned about a specific planet in our solar system.

Here is the brief and criteria they needed to follow to complete the task:


Please check out our movies. We worked really hard on them and would love your feedback - leave a comment!!

Mercury

Come to our great planet,Mercury

Amy & Elliott's asteroid belt movie

Come and see the Best holiday full of fun!

Earth - the Ultimate Getaway

Check out our first completed movie on a planet from our solar system.... What better planet to start with; Earth.

Disaster Experts

Over the past couple of weeks Room 15 have become experts at various types of natural disasters. We have decided to share our information by creating animated movies using xtranormal

Check out these fantastic interviews... there's more come too!

By Matthew



By Celine & Freijah



By Gareth & Ryan



By Xanthe & Maddy



By Freijah

Playing with Xtranormal

Over the next couple of weeks we will be experimenting with a cool web tool called Xtranormal to share our knowledge on natural disasters. This is a fantastic tool that allows you to create animated movies.
Yesterday we had a play with writing a basic script. Well done to the 'mystery' Room 15 student who had a play at home and made this great little clip.

Check it out!

What's the Plan Stan?

Our inquiry focus for this term Natural Disasters and how to prepare for them.



For our first week we brainstormed our existing knowledge on disasters with each other. We categorised this information into three groups:

How they occur?
Information on historic disaster
How to keep safe when they occur?

New Eastbourne Developments... Tell us what you think?

We have been working incredibly hard over the past 3 weeks preparing our proposals for a new community facility in Eastbourne. We finally finished this week and presented our proposals to the class using Keynote. Before we presented, we brainstormed and constructed a set of criteria to judge what would make a quality presentation. Here's what we came up with:



Click on the videos to view our presentations. We would really appreciate your feedback on if you think our proposals are a viable option for Eastbourne.

The results are in!

Thank you to everyone who completed our community survey (over 170 of you!). We are currently in the process of analysing the results and creating our proposals for a new community facility.

Here are some results from our survey.

Eastbourne Survey - We need you help!

As part of our social inquiry this term the students in Room 15 have produced a survey they would like you to complete on Eastbourne. IT IS VERY SHORT and only takes a couple of minutes to complete. To make the data accurate we really need as many responses as possible so every person in the house can complete it. It would also be great if you could forward this on to friends and family in the community.

Click on the link below or visit the class blog.

Eastbourne Survey

Thanks a lot

Stu Devenport and the students of Room 15

Learning from Others

This week the Year 5 and 6 Team have had a couple of visitors to talk to us to assist us with our social inquiry process.

On Wednesday Nancy Barclay presented to us how she was involved in the process on widening the footpath between Windy Point and Days Bay. We learned that there was a lot of consultation needed with many different groups within the community.


On Thursday we had Derek and Ian visit us from the Eastbourne Community Board. They shared with us their plans to upgrade the village in Eastbourne.


We discovered that all these plans take a lot of time and cost a lot of money before they become reality.

The way we were...

Over the past couple of weeks Room 15 has been investigating how Eastbourne looked in the past. We have used Google Maps to share our mini reports on community facilities from the past.

Click on the images of the past to find out more.


View Eastbourne History by Room 15 in a larger map

Images from the past

Big Questions:

1. What did it used to be like?
2. What is it like now?
3. Why has it changed?

Historic Walk

For our social inquiry this term we are looking at how Eastbourne has changed over the past 100 years. In particular, we are looking at how community resources have changed over the years.

Today we took a little (wet) walk around our immediate community. Right next door to school we found a sign for Ballinger Gardens and learned that this used to be a croquet club.

We then visited Rona Bay Wharf and discovered how this busy it really used to be! It regularly was used for ferries to arrive and depart from, along with fishing boats. As the roads to Eastbourne improved there was less demand to use the ferry service.

Independent Inquiry

This week we started our independent inquiry on renewable energy. Our task is to make an informed opinion on the big idea above. To do this we need to investigate the pros and cons of several forms of renewable energy, including solar. This is a big task and will involve a lot of concentration. It will also require us to use many skills including skimming and scanning, note taking and summarising (to name just a few!)

So far we have brainstormed our existing knowledge and thought carefully about some questions we would like to investigate. On Wednesday we used the www to start gathering information to assist us answering our questions.

Below is link to a wiki that has a wide variety of websites on different types of renewable energy. We used this as our starting point for research.

Explanations from Inquiry

Today we used the Voicethread to record our explanations we have written over the past couple of weeks. We have broken our explanations into paragraphs so you will hear the 'What' before the 'How or Why'.

Following the Shadows

Today we investigated the path of the sun across our sky. We were also exploring the relationship between the placement of the sun and the length of our shadows.

We discovered the lower the sun is in sky the longer our shadow will be. The higher the sun is in the sky and shorter our shadow will be.

At midday the sun is at its higher point and is at its most powerful. This position is called Meridian.