WELCOME TO OUR BLOG!

Here are some words about our current Mantle of the Expert work, which is with a class of year 4 students.

In this Mantle of the Expert unit the children are in role as a team of earth scientists who work in a fictional company called 'Geo Ready' (modelled on New Zealand’s real crown institute ‘GeoNet’).

Working in this role children will have jobs and tasks to complete that will lead to learning about:

a. New Zealand’s geological hazards: volcanos, earthquakes, and tsunami

b. Scientific equipment used to measure land movement/activity

c. How earth scientists at 'GeoNet' decide where to place their different monitoring systems. In making these decisions children will have to consider things such as types of land forms and rocks in an area, environmental factors such as weather, read maps, investigate history of land, look at old land records, and investigate land ownership and explore ways to seek permissions from land owners.

The work will involve inquiry research, writing in a range of genres including letter writing and report writing, reading a range of materials including lots of map-work covering a variety of keys and scales, and mathematical skills including measuring, and diagram/graph work.

We hope you enjoy sharing our learning journey and the discoveries we make! You can also read past learning journeys by selecting from 'Previous Mantle of the Expert Work at Muritai School', which is a tab on the right hand side of this blog page.


Detail from a map of Wellington geology

Sorting rocks

2 May 2013

Ancient Greece Mantle of the Expert Unit Below


This is a bridge post between our last Mantle of the Expert unit and our current one.  

Here are some words about our last year's Mantle of the Expert work with year 3 and 4 students, which is described in the posts below.  To view the learning journey from the beginning you need to go to older posts at the bottom of this page.  Previous Mantle of the Expert work I have done at Muritai School is also recorded on a number of different blogs.  To link to these you can click on them under 'Previous Mantle of the Expert work at Muritai School' on the right hand side of this page.

In the unit described below here we learnt about Ancient Greece in-role as archeologists who specialise in the study of artifacts from the Golden Age of Ancient Greece, 479-431BC.

We spent some time in-role as Ancient Athenians living c450BC.In this frame students experienced examples of daily life as Ancient Greeks and came across objects and stories of the time.

The children switched between these two frames throughout the unit. The different frames informed each other as the objects and stories they encountered as Athenians from the Golden Age of Ancient Greece provided the knowledge and expertise they required as modern day archeologists. The artifacts they uncovered as archeologists required out of role inquiry work to find out how to interpret their finds. By stepping into the shoes of the Ancient Athenians we had the opportunity to play out our ideas and in this way consolidated our learning.

No comments:

Post a Comment