RSS Feed

Posts Tagged ‘drawing’

  1. A-Z

    11 February 2015 by shartley

    Sometimes the timing of something perfectly lands an idea right in your lap.  Cathy Wilcox’s Australia Day A-Z cartoons in the smh did exactly that.  When I first saw it just a few days before I was to start teaching Society and Culture to a new bunch of Year 11s, I knew this was my hook, my illustration of society and culture and the various concepts we use in the course, to be specific: society, culture, persons, environment, time, power, authority, gender, globalisation, identity and technologies.

    After showing  Cathy Wilcox’s cartoons to the students, talking through how they linked to the course concepts, the students were required to do an A-Z to represent the culture of the school.  This turned into a particularly interesting social exercise for the class because in Years 7-10 only boys attend, meaning all the girls were brand new to the school.  Groups were organised with roughly 2 boys and 3 girls in each to allow the boys to explain some of the significance of what they wanted to include.  The students took about half an hour to come up with the A-Z ideas (at end of the first class where I showed them the Australia Day versions) and then an hour (the next lesson) for the ideas of the drawings and actually doing them.  They had a lot of fun doing it, they learned a lot about each other, the school and the course.  I enjoyed watching the relationships develop and seeing them grapple with the concepts and how they relate to the school.  So far, they appear to be an interesting and interested class.  I hope the enthusiasm and thinking brains stay focused.

    I’ve uploaded in SlideShare (and embedded here) a combined ‘A-Z of our school‘ of the three groups to illustrate the result:


  2. Expectations

    4 February 2015 by shartley

    WaterCycle7 WaterCycle11 WaterCycle10 WaterCycle9 WaterCycle8 WaterCycle2 WaterCycle6 WaterCycle5 WaterCycle4 WaterCycle3

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Boys can’t draw.  Year 9 Boys are horrible.  So many kids with special needs in that class, you’re going to struggle to get anything done.

    These are the sort of statements that have been tossed around as I prepared to teach Year 9 Geography this week.  The game was a huge hook but now I had to follow up on it.  I found a lame but mildly entertaining video clip on YouTube to cover the Natural Water Cycle and then asked the students to draw an A4 sized diagram of the Natural Water Cycle in the workbooks.  There were mutterings of “I can’t draw” but all but a handful just got on with it.  The first step for most of them was an online image search for a diagram and then they copied it into their books.  As the first few were finishing I added to the task that they had to introduce 2-3 examples of the human impact on the Natural Water Cycle and then to write a paragraph about these human impacts.

    By far the majority of the diagrams were fabulous and the students were on task and even engaged.  I’m not sure why.  Every time I congratulated a student on a good drawing they swelled with pride.  When I took photos of some of the better ones, again they were pleased.  It doesn’t take much.  There are only four boys out of the 29 present today that had sub-standard drawings.  I’m quite pleased with that result.

    At the end of the lesson I introduced the class to the Google Class I had established for them and chaos ensued as they all encountered various issues with joining the Google Class.  I had a student expert in the room who helped and eventually we had just about everyone logged in.  Then the silliness commenced as they chatted within the Google Class page.  I said they had an hour to take the messages down or there would be consequences.  One student asked how they were to take them down and I said if they could figure out how to do a comment they could figure out how to delete them.  A few hours later I checked and they were all gone.

    There was a similar occurrence with Year 7 last week as they were being introduced to various online tools within a ‘Getting to Know the Library’ exercise.  A task asked students to add a sticky about their favourite book in Padlet.  Like it was with Year 9, silliness prevailed and there were silly comments all over the Padlet page very quickly.  We talked about the first impressions they were making of themselves online and in person, that Year 7 was a fresh start and a chance to establish the person they wanted to be and how they wanted to be seen and respected.  The silliness subdued after that.


Skip to toolbar