Session 13 - Somerly Primary School Year 3 - Jodie Davidson & Katy Hough

DESIGNING YOUR OWN GROUP

1. Standing in your own space, using only your body - show me a collaborative bilby, a disciplined spiny devil lizard, an imaginative tiger snake, a persistent emu, an inquisitive wallaby

2. Your challenge is to create your own group - There will be a prize for the winning group today. 

3. Each group must have

   1. one person who is good at details (cutting around pictures)

   2. one person is good at research 

   3. one person who is good at reading maps

4. In your group decide on a name (write this on the board - columns)

5. In your group discuss what you might need to do to help each other win the prize - 1 minute

We will look at various Australian children’s picture books to link into the 80th Anniversary celebrations of the CBCA Book Week and to encourage positivity around reading.

1. There are different parts of your challenge with points awarded at the end of each challenge. The group with the most points at the end wins. The challenge will determine how well your group can use all five of the creative habits.

2. Cut out as many animals and their names as you can and glue them onto individual pieces of coloured card - each group has a different colour - 5-10 minutes

3. Tally the number for each group and add to the board 

4. Looking inside the picture books, how many states can you find where this animal lives in the wild? Sort them into piles - 5-10 minutes

5. Tally one point for each correct location

6. There is something sneaky happening…there are 7 non native animals - 6 are on the first page and 1 is on the second. Can you spot them - 5 minutes

7. One point for each correct answer

8. If you listened carefully and heard any clues for your remaining animals, you have 5 minutes to place them in the places where they can be found

9. Tally one point 

Crunch and Sip - Read ‘A is for Australian Animals’ by Frane Lessac and listen for clues

Optional extra for early finishers

• Group animals - how many of each do we have?

• Add animals to the map by finding their location and pinning them in the correct state

• How many extra animals do we need to complete our sets?

1. Reflecting back on your choices of creative animals, pick the animal that you think represents the creative habit the whole class used most today.

2. How would you choose to colour your animal to represent this habit? You can include a logo, a cape, accessories (cane, glasses, suitcase etc)

Successes

• Doing the warm up outside was so much better than being in the classroom

• Participation continued to improve throughout the session, as did their group collaboration

• Extending their time after tallying their first set of points to complete tasks and build on their scores. 

• Their interest in the animal sculptures brought in and guessing what was inside each of them

• Ongoing attention to the tasks, particularly collaboration, discipline and persistence.

• The number of cards that each group completed today, their cutting out and identifying non native animals

Challenges

• Some of the groupings were challenging for them to begin with however as the session progressed along with the competition, each group developed tasks and implemented creative habits in working together effectively

• Katy is really challenged for time at the moment so trying to get everything pinned up onto the board so that the students can see it and relate to the different areas throughout the country is taking longer than we anticipated

• We didn’t get through the entire main activity however we will continue the rest in our next session. We like that we are able to shuffle things along depending on student engagement.

Bringing them back to attention is happening much quicker as is their ability to work with different people. We shuffled the groups today and although they were able to choose their own group based on the criteria, we did ask them to mix them up so that they weren’t all boy or girl groups. Giving them time to organise this themselves took longer but proved effective in the long run with every group working together. They are interested in the different animals which we hope will eventually also help them to understand Australian states, their features and landmarks.