We continued to look at descriptive language last week, using photos and soundscapes as stimuli to build shared descriptions of the features of a particular place. Students also drew and discussed how they connected to these places through their own experiences. After a shared reading of ‘Heart in a Bottle’ by Oliver Jeffers, we used a fantastic illustration from the storybook to work on building descriptive language in our writing and make meaningful connections by using the sentence starters ‘I see…’ and ‘It reminds me of…’.
In Maths, students continued to look at place value up to 1000 and skip counting forwards and backwards by 2’3, 3’s, 5’s, and 10’s in workshops over the week, and had the opportunity to consolidate their learning and challenge their understanding through individual, partner, and writing activities during Projects and Provocations sessions. Using a map of the school, students described and located ‘treasures’ that were found during a walk around the school grounds. Exploring a ‘bird’s eye’ plan view of our local environment allowed students to begin to build up a vocabulary of ‘direction language’ as well as their map reading skills within a familiar context before we begin to look at maps of different scales and larger areas over the term.
In an Inquiry workshop, students worked in small groups to identify and locate significant landmarks and places in their local neighbourhoods, as well as further away, using Google Maps. This was a way for students that had a chance to explore the program last week to share their knowledge with their peers, and to practice moving between map, satellite, and street view, and typing in addresses of locations that they would like to find, and noting the places that they’d visited. We discovered quite a few interesting things, for example, that it is possible to visit the gorilla and lemur exhibits in the Melbourne Zoo, and some students even found underwater ‘street views’ of the Great Barrier Reef.
We also spent time brainstorming students’ ideas of ‘special places’, and then categorised these into topic headings such as ‘holiday places’, ‘places in nature’, ‘places in/around my home’, ‘places near the water’, and ‘places in different country’. This lead into students drawing their own special place, as the starting point of the ‘My Place’ projects that we will start working on this week.