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/