Nutrition Pamphlet

We finished up the Nutrition pamphlet last week. Overall I think it went well, there was some really good work from some students. I do think that it went on a bit too long. Next time I will set the deadline a bit closer.

For this task I created a pamphlet template that students needed to fill out with real information. The chose a nutrient, researched how much is required, how much is in various foods, designed a meal to have 1/3 of you daily needs for it, and turn it all into a pamphlet. It was a great self directed mini inquiry. Once I set them off with a few links they did most of the work themselves. There was good numeracy content in calculating percentages, measurements of portion size, conversions, tables and lots of other bits. And once they got started the students found out how to do what they needed to know independently. I say students grappling with conversion problems and finding their way through by themselves. It was great.

Filming the teacher

Today I had a few minutes of teacher talk to explain how to work out something for the pamphlet. This is the sort of thing that is always problematic. It usually invoves a lot of work to keep them quiet and attentive. The students haven't hit the problem yet so they don't have the motivation to listen or take notes. By the time they need it (in five minutes) half of them will have forgotten. I decided to try a trick from ulearn. I told them that thety all had netbooks with webcams and that if they thought they would want to hear what I said again they should video me. It went down well. All the netbooks (and one phone) were aimed at me. An interesting side effect was: because they were all filming they didn't want to make any noise to ruin the recording. I didn't Everone was listening attentively. It was great! I'll definately use this again.

I did talk about how I was happy for them to video me explaining things any time but that I did not want them to publish the videos without my consent. I also suggested that they could ask their other teachers to do this as well.

Maths Blogs

We started blogs in maths last week. I think it has been going ok. Not everyone is thrilled to be writing in maths but everyone is doing it. The biggest difficulty has been getting the kids to write quietly. They spend so much time being able to talk and share ideas that the class is not used to silence. Today is the first day that it has been quiet enough for me to blog at the same time. I've found it good reading the blogs. It's been a nice way to get insight into how they are doing.