Session 7 Joseph Banks Year 8 Science - FIFO Life

Between illness (both) and Tom’s PL we’ve missed a week and had to shift to a last-lesson Friday session so knew we’d need a quick physical warm-up to get the students involved. Warm up involved our pet rocks as they still a really enthusiastic about them - pop stick challenge with one hand, one pop stick for each partner to try to move one of the pet rocks the length of the classroom from desk to desk. Really pleased to see significant levels of persistence here! (Smaller class than usual helped, I think, and we had several conversations about how everyone has different kinds of abilities.) Good collaboration and discussions.

We had some video answers back from just one of our FIFO workers, but she mentioned that she worked at Yandi minesite near Newman, so we got the students to find out three fun facts about Yandi before we watched the video. Interesting to see Kaylee really work hard at this (usually only disruptive), found more info than anyone else, also took the initiative to look it up on Google Maps etc. Sonny also great with research and note-taking. By pure chance there were some great facts available - like the 2.5km ore train - we discussed local landmarks to try to picture this, eg walking to Grandis Primary School is only half the length of this train. The fact that Yandi is being closed down next year meant Tom found a video of them rehabilitating part of the site so that also provided some discussion and linked into the final phase of mining from the curriculum that we have discussed the least. It also tied into Kaylee finding some ‘forests’ of plantations on the site via Google Maps, obviously in areas they’ve already rehabilitated. 

We then showed them my spliced together video of some of their questions and Georgia’s answers. Students really interested in her answers and great to have someone young and relatable talking about her work (she is a truck driver there) - provoked great discussion when she explained they can’t be on their phone or have earphones in during their 12 hour driving shifts and are monitored by camera to make sure they don’t. So interesting for all of us!

Double-pronged reflection, we first got the students to write some thank you notes to photograph and send to Georgia and they willingly did this. We then discussed the Creative Habits and identified how much they’d collaborated on the pop stick task, took a bit more prompting to identify that the Yandi task demonstrated good inquisitiveness. 

Unfortunately Tom is off Monday and Wednesday next week so our final lesson for the term will be last lesson Friday (last moments before the school holidays!), so this is a challenge - although it might mean we have a smaller group again which can be a positive. We hopefully will have more videos from the FIFO workers and can discuss with the students how we’ll edit these together.

 Missing more than half the class today due to illness and a lightning carnival, but smaller group was actually great and much more engaged than usual, especially students who are usually quite disruptive. While they are not always on task they are clearly curious about our subject matter and showing them a “real live” FIFO worker really helped. Hopefully we can have some more to discuss and share next week.

As above, we’ll try to wind up the FIFO Life project with our final videos, and will need to plan this in more detail when we know closer to next session how many videos we have etc. 

Amanda to follow up FIFO workers and send thanks to Georgia.