Week 4 - Two brolgas + an m&m pie

Brolga Song

This storyboard is a retell from of an indigenous dreaming story animation from the ABC's Dustechoes site (abc.net.au/dustechoes). It was made using the diagram function in Inspiration 8IE. The stills where cut down from screen shots in Paint. My friend showed me how to export an image from Inspiration. I found this task a fresh take on the retell, suitable for grades 4 up.

Dust echoes is a rich collection of indigenous stories. The twelve animations are each a few minutes long. None of the stories that I looked at had any dialogue, but my tech savvy friend found that you can add some narration by clicking the "mash up" button on the main menu page. Short quizzes accompany each story and check for inferential comprehension. Detailed teacher notes (PDF) are most useful for understanding narrative complexities. They have some basic lesson suggestions. I'd recommend screening the stories before using these stories with primary children because some contain violent themes (see particularly Namorrodor).

Activity 2: Excel

A sophisticated twist on a classic classroom chance and data activity.

Tech skills involved: data entry and chart drawing, recoloring sections of the graph, adding a title, importing images from the m&m website, and resizing different components.

A real world, hands on activity. Extends easily into percentages and fractions, and graph literacy. Student might look at a variety of graphs for the same data set: are there some representations that distort the proportions? Are there some which communicate clearly? What happens as the data set gets bigger?

Anaphylaxis worries will prevent chocolates being used in many classrooms. Additionally, I have some hesitation about guiding my students through the m&m website which is child-targeted marketing of chocolates. Some alternatives that were suggested today are: confetti, plastic stars, counters chosen at random, play coins, lego pieces, soup mix. Of those, lego is probably my pick as they may be sorted in a number of ways - shape, colour and function - and is an educational and engaging activity in its own right.