Spray Frames

Finally all of our frames and surreal art is finished.

This was a new experience for me. Never during my career I have I spray painted with a class. Although I learnt a lot about managing spray painting with 28 enthusiastic artists, I will not require this learning in the future. The main thing I think we all learnt was it was smelly. It was also a lot of fun and the frames that we made look amazing. I have managed to remove the paint from all of the places that we did not want to spray paint and Mr Hogg has almost forgiven us for the general chaos. Not really a spray and walk away type situation.

Each frame has pegs for the writing of our artists to be displayed through out the year.

Statistics

We have been working on building understandings around concepts in Statistics through investigations over the term.

It has been messy but really worthwhile. Two teachers from Balmacewen Intermediate came to visit our classroom to see what we have been exploring and how we are learning through investigation rather than content delivered directly from the teacher. It is easy to forget as adults that the knowledge we value most was probably not just served up to us on a plate. The joy in learning is in the discovery and we feel really proud of this learning because it is evidence to us of what a creative meaning maker we can be.

Rather than learning about graphs Room 7 were challenged to build ramps for marbles to run down. They had to try to create a ramp which was as consistent as they could.

Each group collected all of their data and tried to communicate it with the class. There were a lot of interesting ways. Most people used bar graphs because that was what they knew. This led to a lot of interesting discussions about why there are so many different types of graphs. We then learnt about scatter graphs (which are used to find correlation). We collected and displayed two more sets of data and each time we realised why features we see on graphs have to be there.

In our mathematics groups we have been looking at the value of numbers and this real life experience of collecting and recording data with accuracy brought rich understandings to the implications of rounding and what an impact that can have to the way data might look.

We realised that all of this really matters as people could really mislead others depending how they treat the data. We learnt to find trends in the data, use this to make predictions and all about outliers.

Next we learnt about some of the places in the real world where statistics can save lives. It is the 100 year anniversary of the Influenza epidemic. We read about the cholera outbreak in Soho which led to the invention of epidemiology and demographics and looked at some of this first work to try to understand what was causing people to become sick. Using simulators the class changed variables to see what would happen to a fake population. We discussed how technology gives a way to use data to test possibilities without anyone getting hurt.

As we came to the end of this amazing work Mrs Walker came down with a stomach bug. Fear was in the eyes of many people believing they might be looking at patient zero. Thank you for your concern Room 7; it was not cholera, I do go to a lot of effort to make learning meaningful but not that far!

This worked as sparked some questions about measures of central tendency which we will learn about this week. You can use the simulators with your children, they are linked on the Theme page of this blog.