The Star of Australia

The Star of Australia - Australia Board Game Project, 6th Grade

Mr Timo Fordell, 5^th grade teacher
Mrs Sanna Kokko, 6^th grade teacher
Mrs Hanna Kukkonen, English and German teacher
Mr Rodrigo Hernanz de Salas, assistant teacher of English
Photos: Mr Rodrigo Hernanz de Salas

The 6^th grade students have now completed their Australia Project. This year the traditional Australia project was a board game project, which was linked to our school’s entrepreneurship project. The difference was that we didn’t have any outside subsidiaries in our project.

Mr Timo Fordell had executed a board game project last year. He gave us invaluable tips and advice before and during the project.

The subjects integrated in this project were geography, biology, Finnish, English and art.
Students were first divided into small groups. They were also seated into these groups in the class room.
The aim of the project was to create a board game on Australia which should be part English part Finnish. The groups could decide how big a role English should play in their game. The goal of the project was to learn about Australia but also to learn new things using integration of different subjects and co-operative learning.

The first step was to find information about Australia in students’ own study books. The students’ assignment at home was to write keywords and key questions in their notebooks. In the notebooks the students had a Finnish and an English page.

The second step was to find information in other than study books. We have quite a large collection of books on Australia in our own library and in addition to those Mrs. Kokko ordered a wide range of books on Australia both in Finnish and in English from our local library.

The third step was to search for information on the internet.

All groups had to find information on basic topics e.g. nature and vegetation, animals, inhabitants/population, history, weather and basic facts on Australia and on one voluntary topic (e.g. sights, sports, music etc.). The home assignment was to find as much information as possible about the voluntary topic.

The fourth step was to invent and plan the board game in which all the information gathered could come to use.

The project lasted almost 4 weeks.

The teachers will evaluate the project. The main targets of evaluation will be commitment to work during the task, creativity, co-operation and the final result.

Things to improve next time will be the following: test playing the games in an earlier stage and test reading the game instructions by other students in course of the work. This time some of the games lacked good and thorough instructions which were hard to correct because lack of time towards the end of the project. When one wanted to develop the project even further one would want to give more time to cultivating the games even further by making fancy dice and fine pawns to the game.

Irregular verbs and writing a blog - English homework during the project  

The students home assignment for this period was to learn 10 irregular verbs for each lesson (all three forms) and write a blog of two days of the week (we have two 45 minutes English lessons in a week). In Finland the 6^th grade students are required to learn only the base form and the simple past form of irregular verbs. In our school we have also learned the past participle forms of the verbs in order to make further studies easier. Some of the students even wanted to learn the 7^th grade verbs - that is significantly more than the verbs that are required in the 6^th grade. The majority of the students learned 80 verbs during the project. 

For the blog writing we used kidblog.org which allows the teacher to view and edit the blog texts before publishing. As this was the first time we used open internet viewing of the blogs (we have used closed internet environment before) I decided to use quite an unorthodox method in publishing pupils’ texts. The pupils sent their texts to me and I made some corrections. Pupils were then advised to read their texts before writing new posts. This worked astonishingly well – most of the students learned from their errors and their posts got better and better by the time even though they didn’t correct their grammar and spelling themselves.
Many pupils got really keen on writing – apparently the fact that anyone could read their posts made the task much more interesting to them. If you want to have a peek at the blogs please click the following address: http://kidblog.org/6thGradePothill/

Skyping with business mentors

The Entrepreneurship project is about to end. Today two companies had an opportunity to get advice from our business mentors.GameStar company, lead by CEO Nea R., had a Skype-meeting with Mr. Antti Sipponen from ABSI consulting. After a short presentation of his career and path to be an entrepreneur he gave some good tips for marketing and improving the game demo sent in advance via YouTube. The staff made tight notes and the suggested advices were updated into business plan.

Later the ProGame staff with CEO Joonas Skype called to Mrs. Minna Abrahamsson-Sipponen, the CEO of ABSI company. She gave good feedback about the groupwork and skills that students had found and agreed together to get work done. This company has some work to do to find a good name for the game they are selling.

Both companies had found very good questions like how big is the salary paid in different jobs, how to improve their marketing material etc.

Today 1st grade subsidiaries gave the first bids for sideproducts. Let's see what the companies think about those. The range was from the plush toys to key rings. Wonderful ideas! Here's two bids:

Wish you had been here

Wish you had been here : Wallwisher
 - How to follow pupils’ activity in a learning process

Mr. Timo Fordell 5th grade teacher and Mrs. Hanna Kukkonen English and German teacher.

In our school we have used collaborative and learner centered methods in teaching and learning for several years. The problem has been how to observe pupils’ activity and commitment during the learning process.  Traditional tools didn’t provide enough information for us teachers.

When we started using internet based Wallwisher we discovered that it met our needs better. Wallwisher is an application in internet where anybody who has rights to certain wall can post a text based on a given task by the teacher.

Geography: Europe

In the beginning we didn’t give instructions specific enough and that’s why pupils wrote too similar sentences or answers to given questions or tasks. When we started to instruct them to mark their posts by number according to their visit to the wall the result was:  no two posts could be the same. This way they were forced to read all the previous posts before they could write their own post. In this process they learn much from the subject in an easy way! The early bird catches the worm - those pupils who are first on the wall have advantage to write whatever they want to about the subject. In this way the teacher can observe the activity of the students.

Even with simple sentences written by individual pupils the final result will be manifold.
The cumulated information made by the whole group of learners can be used as a base for further learning.

History: Egypt

So far we have used the Wallwisher in Finnish, English, German, history and science.

In languages the main point is to encourage learners to produce text in their own level.  In the general level the aim is to encourage learners to produce a piece of information as a member of a learning group. Everybody contributes to the final result. The wall isn’t finished until everyone has done their own part.

The pupils have responded very well to these tasks – they can use their creativity freely. The task is not too complicated or time consuming – on the contrary, pupils seem to enjoy producing text and pictures more and better than the teacher expects. The biggest challenge for us teachers is to create tasks interesting enough in order to keep the pupils’ interest alive. If you are interested we recommend to visit www. wallwisher.com / www.padlet.com

English: word of the day, imagine

Problem solving for a Master Thesis

Mrs. Paula Vorne
1st grade teacher

Last week 1st grade students got a visitor from the Oulu University. 

She was a teacher student who was gathering material for her Master’s thesis. Purpose of her study is to find out how the methods of drama teaching can be used as a tool to teach scientific phenomena’s. 

Making an air balloon

Today’s subject was air and its features. Session started with a drama practice where the students got also basic knowledge of the subject. Then they answered some questions on a paper about hot air balloon and get to design their own balloon. At the end of the two hour session students made simple hot air balloons which were tested with a hair dryer and they worked! 

More Kodu games

Kodu Club members have been busy making new learning games. Here is a taste for a one for English learning made by a 9 years old 3rd grader Joonas. There is more coming......

Valentine's Day

Happy Valentines Day friends all over the world!

Cartoon: Roope 6th grade

Click the video also here

Our outdoor learning environment

Snowlabyrinth 2013 part 1

Today was the day that the students of Patamäki school have been waiting for the whole winter.

Two bulldozers came and gathered all the snow in to big piles and now we can start building the

every year tradition in our school yard, at least 200 square meters wide snowlabyrinth. Before

digging we must tamp down the biggest snow pieces. When done we ask help from the whole community and parents and finish it together :)

Stay tuned how the building continues…

 Here's a story and photos from previous years

Peer Coaching with 1st grade

What am I made of? What’s good for me?

 Mrs. Paula Vorne, 1st grade teacher

Children are always interested in studying the human body. This time our 1^st and 5^th grade students were even more excited because they did some of the studying together. Peer coaching is a powerful tool and we used it so that the 1^st graders good get better learning results on the subject. First step was that the 1 st graders were divided into groups and the groups were given five subjects: body parts, rest, nutrition, exercise and hygiene and their job was to come up with key words under every subject. Key words were used then to form questions with the godstudents from 5^th grade. 5^th graders had already practiced question making in their own class and their job was to guide the 1^st grader to find and form the right kind of questions.

Next time when the students met the questions were shared to all of them and they had to answer them with a whole sentence. Godstudents role was then to help the 1^st graders form and write right kind of sentences because some of the 1^st graders have only recently learned how to read and their writing skills are in early stages. Last step of this project was that the older students helped the 1^st graders to change the sentences of their choice so that they were all in “me”-form. Teacher took a photo of every student and the printed photos were used so that every student made a poster of themselves. 

Working with the godstudents was very important for the 1^st graders and they were always anxiously waiting for the next time. 5^th graders carried their responsibilities really good and I could see from their expression that they felt themselves really important as they were supposed to.