How We Organize Ourselves - Planning a Journey

Our current Unit of Inquiry centres on

  How We Organise Ourselves

Preparation before leaving

It is an inquiry into the interconnectedness of human-made systems and communities; the structure and function of organisations; societal decision-making; economic activities and their impact on humankind and the environment.

Our central idea is that: 

Planning a journey requires a range of organisational skills and strategies.

Through this unit we will look at the key concepts of  Perspective, Function and Responsibility

We will inquire into:

·          The attributes that make a location personally appealing; Perspective,

·          The procedures of booking and planning a journey within Indonesia; Function

·          The obligations and protocols that people must follow when planning a journey in our society; Responsibility

Finding the way

We hope that through the sharing of and looking at how adults might plan a major trip such as a camping trip, children will be able to effectively plan a trip that the class can go on. I shared photos of my recent trip to Tasmania and how I organised an overnight camping trip.

The trail

Setting up camp

In the past weeks students have looked closely at how to plan a trip and what we need to consider in different environments. Through this blog we will be sharing some of the work they have been doing. One of our first tasks was to map the local community when we went on our first trip to Taman Kencana. As part of this unit will look at how we use maps to find our way around and represent the real world.

We always look at the central idea and identify the bases and meaning sof the key words. This is very important right at the outset.

Identifying some things we need to consider when we are planning a journey.

Arranging the planning in a sensible order.

Double - Not Double

We worked on finding the pattern for when to double a letter when adding a suffix. Here we are constructing a flowchart to help fix that information in the long term memory.

Gathering data first.

Building the flowchart questions.

Constructing our own mini flowcharts.

Writers' Workshop

We have been spending much of our time looking at the structure of a narrative story. Here we have recorded our thinking about narratives. Student are now building up stamina for creative writing. 

First drafts are written for later editing.

Everyone is concentrating on the writing process.

Maths - Time

We have been looking at different ways to tell the time and how to solve problems with elapsed time. It is a very tricky concept to grasp. Time is closely related to fractions.

Reading

Mrs Lyn is helping out with instruction in how to look for specific information in a text.

PE - Gymnastic

Gymnastics challenges with Pak David.

Mung Beans Experiment

Toward the end of Term 2 we soaked some mung beans to see what woudl happen. We observed and described the beans; predicted what would happen and then watched them over a week. We found that many beans grew at different rates. We finally planted the beans in the garden. This is an important part of the scientific process.

observing 

planting

recording

Days of the Week

As part of this unit of inquiry we learnt about the history behind the days of the week. We used dictionaries, etmology dictionaries and then presented our work visually.