Coffs Harbour Public School Blog

Courtesy & Honour – Principal:Leonie Buehler

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Stage 3 Self Nominated Projects and Speeches

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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Digital Photography

Grade 5 students were introduced to digital photography as they were able to use a Canon 600D SLR camera to take images around their school courtesy of Southern Cross University. Suddenly the ordinary became interesting and the students eyes were opened as they viewed their environment with a photographers eye. Angles, lines, trees, paint on walls, an empty fruit juice popper were just some examples. They had to cope with the manual applications of the camera as they attempted to get clear, sharp images using different settings. The day was far too short but all the students worked extremely well and were highly engaged with this activity 🙂

5N and 5M Students

 

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Virtual Antarctic information reports

As part of their English information report unit students from 5M also had to complete a virtual element by building the Antarctic animal they had been researching. They then needed to capture and upload their information report to produce a display. The students worked in groups and only had four lessons to complete the building component. They all did a great job sharing the task and collaborating on ideas. They used books and images when building to obtain authenticity. The Humpback whales look wonderful as they are feeding on krill 🙂 The other animals researched were:

Virtual Antarctica Information Reports

Ms Mulrooney, Mrs Booth and 5M

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Murder under the Microscope Results

This explains what happened: MuM 2012 Case Notes

Well done Mighty 5M for fantastic sleuthing and researching  to solve the 2012 Murder under the Microscope challenge.

5M successfully selected the correct victim, villain and crime site after researching and forming a hypothesis as to who, what and where the eco-crime had been committed.

We all thought it was the cane toad who was the villain but then at the last minute an urgent email came in telling us that no toads had been sighted at the crime site! It had to be gamba grass! We then had a last minute vote using our selected democratic council and at 11am lodged our accusations online. Wow, was it busy, even though our accusation was logged at 11.01am we were approximately the  260th school that made an accusation. Over 600 schools logged in within the first 5 minutes!

It was great fun and to have the correct results was brilliant. Did you know some scientists have suggested bringing in elephants to combat the Gamba grass epidemic. Read about it here and wouldn’t this make a great topic for a discussion or persuasive text? What do you think? Should we introduce elephants into Australia to combat the gamba grass problem in the Northern Territory and Western Australia?

Victim: Northern Quoll

Villain: Gamba grass

Crime site: Pentecost River, Kununurra, Western Australia

Ms Mulrooney, Mrs Booth and 5M

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Stage 3 Gold Virtual Build

Stage 3 classes finished up with their HSIE Gold! unit last week. Many of the grade 5 students had been working on a virtual simulation of a gold rush town and the end result is wonderful. Mrs Booth filmed the build today but there were a few glitches with the program she was using!  Also some of the students missed out exporting their builds onto the sim due to various reasons but the overall result and watching the students collaborate on the shared sim as they terraformed the land, selected Eucalyptus trees, various grasses and images was brilliant. Some of the builds didn’t export well and this was a result of poor linking or ‘virtual gremlins’. A lot of learning on many different levels went into this project and all the students involved should be very proud of their work 🙂 Well done everyone.

Stage 3 Gold Virtual Build on PhotoPeach

 

My Place Website

My Place: For Teachers

Mrs Booth

We love comments

 

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Minecraft app review and virtual building on the SMART Board

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5M had to select and review either the Epic Citadel or Minecraft app for iPad on Thursday. Some students chose Epic Citadel but most chose the Minecraft app with many of the students experiencing it for the first time. They initially spent time exploring the app before writing their review.

We now have use of the school iPads in our Virtual Worlds Library Club on Thursdays at lunchtime, thank you Mr Hickey.Everyone was either mining in creative or survival mode, Mrs Booth is yet to survive one night,or creating and exploring in the other 3D immersive world of sim-on-a-stick. Due to the amount of students in the library Mrs Booth had to rotate the iPads on a regular basis. It is a little hectic, but just brilliant to watch the students so highly engaged and willing to share their knowledge and hand over the iPads to new students without complaint! Serious learning and fun at the same time 🙂

Courtney investigates the Minecraft app for iPads and builds virtually using the SMART Board from Coffs Harbour PS on Vimeo.

Mrs Booth

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Luke’s Ship

Yesterday Luke showed me what he had been building for the HSIE project, a ship! I was amazed at the work that had gone into his creation and it isn’t finished yet. Though he had a few problems with his sim whilst he was showing me we managed to export a copy onto the class 5M sim and place it in the river. Then the other students decided to hop on board for a sneek peek and group photo. Great work Luke and we can’t wait to see it in its finished form 🙂

Luke’s Ship from Coffs Harbour PS on Vimeo.

Mrs Booth

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Can you build a heptagon?

On Wednesday and Thursday both year 5 classes will be working with both the iPads and virtual technology for their maths lessons. They will be using the astronomy apps to continue with radius, diameter and circumference problems connected to the solar system, and using sim-on-a-stick to create a geometric shape called a heptagon…this will be tricky as it has 7 sides at an angle of approximately 51 degrees.

 

 

 

 

5N Virtual Geometry on PhotoPeach

How to draw a heptagon from Coffs Harbour PS on Vimeo.

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Technology Tuesday

It was great to arrive to school and again find students from 5N working hard on their HSIE virtual projects. We also have an extra session after maths on Tuesdays to allow the students time to get their building finished.Thanks Mrs Newton 🙂

Mrs Booth is amazed at the bags of gold, pick axes, houses and furniture, tents, gold pans, pound notes, licenses and everything else that is being created. Students are using the grids for measuring and that higher order thinking has really kicked in. Fantastic work 5N.

I had to make a quick video of the terrific work they were doing this morning as I am very proud of them accomplishing so much in such a short space of time. This really amplifies the strength of learning when using 3D immersive technology.

Mrs Booth

How was your Tuesday spent at school?

 

 

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iPad Circle Hunt Stage 3

Both class 5N and 5M set off this week on a maths quest to find the radius, diameter, circumference and area of selected circles. They used iPads loaded with QR readers to scan the QR codes Mrs Booth had created. These had the clues needed to find the next circles location. The students were paired and armed with a worksheet, ruler, pencil and iPad.  There were some sharp minds as area and circumference are Stage 4 (grade 7) outcomes and some students managed to complete some or all of this section. Well done 🙂 Everyone loved using the Star Walk and Solar Walk Apps to get the answers to the astronomy section of the activity. A big thank you to Mrs Bullen for loading all the apps onto the iPads and making them available for us.

Also a big thank you to Ms Jacka for supporting class 5M on Thursday.

Here are the tasks they were set:
Using a ruler, measure the radius of the various circles. Then use the formulas you have been shown to calculate the diameter, circumference and area of each circle. Don’t forget to label your units and add squared ² onto an area.  If you finish all of these go to your iPad and Star Walk App and ‘Sky Live’ to locate the names of the four planets rising . You need to find the radius, length of year (Earth years), and surface temperature (Celsius) of each planet.

Formulas:

  • Pi: π=3.14
  • Diameter:  d=2r (radius x 2)
  • Circumference: C=πd (diameter x 3.14)
  • Area: a =πr² (radius squared x 3.14)
An example would be: A circle has a radius of 6cm therefore 6 + 6 = 12cm, and the diameter is 12 cm. The circumference is then 12 x 3.14 (pi) = 37.68cm. Finally the area is calculated 6 x 6 = 36cm and 36cm x 3.14 (pi) = 113.04cm2 ( area always has a squared symbol).

The idea for this lesson came from a great teacher in America called Mr Avery and the link to his excellent class blog is in the blogroll. Here is the link to his blog post about The great Circle Hunt of 2012.

Mrs Booth

Do you use iPads for maths?

 

 

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