Crossmaglen Public School was awarded acknowledgement as a Waterwise School by Coffs Harbour Mayor Denise Knight. A morning tea was held and then students presented a slide show on what it meant to be a Waterwise School. Afterwards they showed the Mayor their water/farming virtual world projects that they have been working on every Friday for the term. The integrated Science, English, and HSIE Stage 1-3 unit overview is as follows:
Students will demonstrate a broad understanding of water usage and sustainability issues relating to its use in agriculture by completing research relating to farming practice.They will design a working farm using virtual world technology (Sim-on-a-Stick) highlighting how water is used and where. Students must demonstrate where water is stored and how it is transferred to areas around their farm. Students are expected to include a simulation of the water cycle. Stage 2 and 3 students will include relevant information on notecards located within their virtual world. Stage 1 students will complete their 3D model using concrete materials creating a diorama and present it using iMovie for iPad.
This project builds upon activities being delivered earlier in the week connected to water (science) with Mrs Champion and the “Who will buy” (HSIE) unit with Mrs Peart. It also integrates Australian Curriculum English outcomes.
The students have done an exceptional job and our excursion to the Bake family dairy assisted the students understanding of water usage in farming so well. Having Vikram as an expert on blueberry farming was also wonderful. Brooke did an amazing job simulating her grandfathers macadamia farm. The following video shows some of the students work. All students were assessed in week 9 on their information notecards (grammar, punctuation, quality of information and relevance), ability to navigate the software, authenticity of textures when building their artefacts and whole knowledge integration from research (all students building blueberry farms had research provided) and term learning. Mrs Booth will get snapshots from the students whose work isn’t shown here and it will be presented on our school blog early in term 4. A number of students scripted their objects (made them move) using Scratch 4 OpenSim and Script Me!
To enable video controls on the video below (if they don’t work for you) right click on the video when it starts to play and then click ‘enable video controls’.
Mrs Booth