Session 6 - Year 8 Science at Joseph Banks - FIFO Life Project

We got students to find their pet rock (we’d collected last week), and gave students who weren’t there last week a moment to create their own. They were then asked to work with their partner and interview each other’s rocks, like a podcaster. Some students engaged really well and had some fun conversations, others tried to ask “rock” questions only, and a few didn’t quite engage, but it was nice to see that the students do really like their rocks!!

We distributed the students’ FIFO life question brainstorms from a fortnight ago, and asked them to decide on 2 or 3 questions they wanted to video to send up to our FIFO people to answer. We had hoped some students would film themselves on their iPads (not all students have a device) but it proved harder to get them to take this responsibility than we’d hoped, so I ended up taking a group at a time into a nearby empty lab to record, and Tom recorded a couple of students as well while herding the rest (great job!). The engagement was varied and some were worried about being filmed or the public speaking part of it but most overcame this, some decided they didn’t want to be filmed but would speak over us filming their rocks (great idea!). Questions were really interesting and lots of variety so the answers should be enlightening.

We used the pebbles in the creative habits colours which the students created last week and asked about which habit they had used most today. The main answer was being collaborative as both our activities involved a lot of this today (and they by and large collaborated really well), so a bunch of students added a purple pebble to our beaker. Tom and I added a green pebble each for our persistence in dealing with difficulty ;) Over the next few weeks we hope that some of our reflections will lead to some layers like the sedimentary rocks we have discussed!

Tom sensibly suggested we do our next step with our FIFO people videos in a fortnight rather than next week to leave enough time for more videos to return to us, so Week 9 will be students compiling this and reflecting on what they have learnt - what’s not what they expected etc. Next week we will interrupt FIFO to look at the layers of earth part of the curriculum.

Tom said he’s really happy to see the students so engaged, that they might sometimes be loud (which doesn’t bother either of us!) but it’s “loud engaged”, which is more engaged than with more regular lessons. 

We had a chat about some ideas for the layers lesson but agreed to ponder further before Wednesday and be in touch. I’ll also trim our student videos and distribute to the FIFO people we’ve contacted.