Dust Echoes

Hi there,

Today we looked at some aboriginal dream time stories on the website:

http://www.abc.net.au/dustechoes

The website has study guides attached to each of the stories, as well as possible classroom activities. This ties into the art adn the literacy domains.

We were asked to go through one of the stories on this website and determine the most significnat images and create a mind-map on Inspiration 8.0.

I chose the story called Morning Star, which was about the first death in the camp. The images that I had chosen was (a) the discovery of the first death, (b) burning the body (c) creating a circle to put the body onto display (d) dancing to send the spirit off to the next life, (e) bathing themselves and (f) the birth of a new member of the camp and the start of the new day.

This was such an entertaining exercise. I loved looking at all of the classroom activities and lessons. I value the multi-dimensional aspects of these activities.

The next activitiy that we completed was graphing the colour of M&M's in a small box. First we recorded a tally of the results on Microsoft Excel. This tally had the columns Colour and Number. Using this table, we created a graph of the results. I found this to be a very entertaining experience. We then went onto the M&M's website and saw that there was a ratio for the number of different colours in each packet. I feel that this would be a wonderful lesson for students from grade 2 onwards.

I am off to my second practicum, so I will not be posting for a little while. I will write a few comments about practicum after I have completed it. I am nervous but excited at the same time.

Talk soon.

Ann