Coffs Harbour Public School Blog

Courtesy & Honour – Principal:Leonie Buehler

Jun
22

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Maths Genius Hour Projects

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Last Thursday, Mrs Booth’s stage 3 maths group (15 students) presented their ‘Genius Hour’ maths projects. Students’ had to turn a passion of theirs into a project making connections to maths. Students’ had 75 minutes each Thursday to work on their project with support from Mrs Booth. It was expected that time would also be spent on this project at home. They could  build, design, make,film or collect something, for example, and the delivery of their presentation was up to them. The project was challenging for a number of the students as they not only needed to make real world connections with maths but also manage their time well. Students completed reflections each week to help them identify the next step to be completed and where they were wasting their time most.The project topics presented were NRL (popular), cricket second test, Lego statistics, Minecraft maths challenge, how far Mario could jump in real life, artistic gymnastics and angles, fractions and the violin, general mathematics in games design, the impact of polygons, velocity and mass in console game design and finally Formula 1. Two students, who had worked extremely hard during the sessions, were unable to present and will be doing so in week 1 of term 2. Their topics were building a billy cart and cubby house…I cannot wait to see their presentations!

All students did very well and everyone asked if they could do another project next term 🙂 This project was fantastic for allowing the students to work mathematically to synthesise and apply their maths knowledge in meaningful ways. They took ownership of their work and developed additional skills that will assist them to be productive learners in high school.

Here is a video from two of the presentations and Miranda takes us through the different fractions (notes) during the lunchtime Minecraft club session 🙂

Mrs Booth

Oct
13

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Les and Maia: Ecological issue in our local catchment area website

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Students are introduced to the Murder under the Microscope website and focus on the biodiversity of their local catchment area. They look at scientific terminology and create a word bank for their own use. They complete an online quiz that investigates cause and effect in ecosystems. Student pairs must also create a website that identifies an ecological issue in the local catchment area and educates others about this issue and why it is important to preserve and protect it. The website will include an Action Plan that shows others in the community what they can do to reduce their ecological footprint.

Les and Maia were part of a science enrichment group last term focussing on ecological issues in our local catchment area. Much of this project required the students to be self sufficient when researching and compiling information. For some students this was a challenge and others found the lots of fun though still hard work as they had to juggle other school work commitments etc. Enrichment projects require students to be self motivated and develop good problem solving strategies as the tasks require higher order thinking processes and self-regulation. For year six students projects of this nature are a great introduction into what is required in high school and two students in particular did a great job creating their website. Maia and Les ran with the task from the beginning, sharing the work load and discussing how they would approach certain aspects of the project. They only required teacher support initially when introduce to creating a Weebly website. They never argued, used the resources provided (and researched  much of their own) and ultimately have done a wonderful job 🙂

Here is a link to their website: Coffs Creek and Littering Don’t Mix

Maia has also gone on to create her own personal Weebly: My Aotearoa, with permission from her dad, and it offers some wonderful advice for other students on friendship, bullying and just being happy with who you are.  Brilliant work Maia 🙂

Here is an outline of the task.

Mrs Booth

Jul
9

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Stage 3 Sydney Camp

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Camp was another wonderful experience for our stage 3 students last week. The venue coordinators were extremely impressed with our student’s behaviour throughout the 4 days. Congratulations to you all. The children were able to see and do many interesting things, including an educational lesson and role play at Old Parliament House, an overnight camping experience at the zoo and the opportunity to watch the ‘Socceroos’ qualify for the World Cup. What a great excursion and our sincere thanks to Mrs Firkins, Mr Woodham, Miss Mulrooney and Miss Callinan for giving our stage 3 students such a memorable excursion.
Meerkat Mel: Hover over the pictures to watch some great videos on very cute Meerkats and their pups 🙂

Here is the slide show 🙂

Apr
18

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Stage 3 Self Nominated Projects and Speeches

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Some students in Stage 3 have been working over term 1 on individual self nominated projects and others researching a particular country for speech assessments. Here is a video presentation showing some of the students work.

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