Joseph Banks Year 8 Science Session 8

Quick drawing warm-up based on Mr Squiggle - one student knew him and a couple of others had heard of him (both - young! - teachers in the room had not!). Showed a 30-sec video of Mr Squiggle to demonstrate the concept then each pair got a page of squiggles (two variants) and instructions to turn them into some kind of mining equipment or something you would find on a minesite - fantastical if they wanted! Got some great results and students really engaged. 

Two parts to this today. Firstly, we had answers from two more FIFO workers to the students’ questions, one on video and one via email. We showed the videos of the students asking questions and showed/read the answers. Most students very keen to hear the answers and our FIFO workers did a great job of responding, too. Later in the class we also replayed the video we had last week as many students had been away then and asked to see it. These all helped with the second part of the main activity: creating a poster illustrating what they thought the pros and cons of the FIFO life are. Some students did better than others with this task and Kylie was the only one to really create an attractive poster but it was great to see that they’d all acquired a lot more knowledge about FIFO throughout the past few weeks.

Three of the students volunteered to come outside with me and record a quick thank you video for our FIFO workers and Tom finished off with the rest of the class. We did lose their attention very rapidly then being the final period of the term so no photos of reflection.

Last period of last day of Term 2 - surprisingly we had well over class there. Tom also had to partly cover some wind-up activities for an absent staff member but was in and out, but we also had a relief teacher, Daniel, who’s actually visual arts teacher so was really intrigued to learn about Creative Schools. 

Wrapped up FIFO life now and will move on to natural disasters next term but will discuss more exact plans during school hols.

Pleased we managed to make the FIFO topic really relatable with the real life answers - so will try to keep this going. In general they love any hands on activity and though a couple can get rowdy they are generally happy to do whatever we ask of them.

Will discuss more plans for Term 3 over the break - natural disasters unit. Perhaps get some of my contacts who’ve been involved in these to give some quick answers too.

Work in progress!

Will focus on this next term. Perhaps a quick summary of our FIFO project to be distributed in some way, will discuss further with Tom.