Robots

We have been attending a robots club at our library with our friends. We recently got our own Edison Robots to experiment with at home. These are easily programmed with either printable bar-codes or by using the free software. They are compatible with Lego so you can build onto them.

A favourite game is wrestling robots.

They can also be made to track a line. We made our own track with black paint.

Google Tour Builder Sydney-Perth Road Trip

The children have been using their travel diaries and photographs to record our road trip using Google Tour Builder.

To get the best experience of their tours use INTERNET EXPLORER to open the links, not Chrome. In this way you can fly over a 3D World.

R's tour

L's tour

Materials

This week we have been investigating materials. What better way to investigate the property of insulation than to make a baked Alaska (above)!

The children also tested materials for their ability to conduct electricity, for magnetism and waterproof properties. We did an experiment to investigate which materials were the most stretchy.

The children also investigated materials used for packing sandwiches and designed their own sandwich boxes:

First they made a net for the box which we imported into the computer and cut out with our Inspiration cutter.

We needed to find out which sandwiches are most popular so the children composed an on-line survey on Survey Monkey.

They then used Word to design some labels for the sandwich boxes.

They then made some sandwiches and packaged them up.

You can view the scheme of work I used here.

Geography Lessons Minus the Boring Text Books!

Recently I had an idea to make geography more interesting by using Google Tour Builder. With this tour builder the children are able to plot places on the map, zoom in close to see the street view or zoom out for a global perspective. They can add photos and videos to each location along with their own written description. It's easy to add links to relevant websites to each place. You can use your own photographs and videos or those found on the web.

I can see this being used in many different ways in geography and the beauty of it is that the children can share their work with their friends or even their home-school inspectors. There's no boring text books to read, the children can easily type in their text avoiding the dreaded pen and paper and it's all presented on the computer in a medium they enjoy.

This term we are going to be studying World news and events.We will add news items to our map each week after watching "Behind the News" on ABC. We have started with the austerity measures in Greece. The children located Athens and pinned photos and videos of the riots to the location. They added some images of Euro coins and notes and wrote in their own words what is happening in the country. Next they "flew" to Mt Raung in Java where the volcano is currently spewing ash into the sky. They enjoyed looking around the crater at ground level and adding images and videos of the eruption. Flying on once more we came to the Lords Cricket Ground in England for the Ashes match. We'll add more items to our tour as the weeks go by before sharing it.

If you wanted to study a particular country you could pin items to the map from your research, photographs, your own drawings, graphs, films and websites. If your topic was local studies it would be fun to add photographs that you yourself had taken to the map, perhaps with images from local news papers. If you really really wanted to you could put in some information from your boring old textbook!

You could scan in postcards and letters you receive from around the world and add them to their departure points. You could look at food labels and plot the locations where items were grown or manufactured, perhaps even following a raw material on its journey from harvesting or mining through to the end product in your local shop. You could add photographs of family and friends places of birth or plot the route for a family trip. I'm sure there is much more you could do that I haven't even thought of.

You'll need to have the Google Earth plug-in to get the full experience of zooming from place to place. Get it here.

You'll also need a Google account so you can save your tours

Beware, Chrome does not work properly with the tour builder site, you'll have to go back to rubbishy Internet Explorer. It will ask you if you want to allow the plug in to run. Say yes!

To get an idea of the things you can do in the tour builder check out the gallery on the Google Tour Builder website for some professional tours that have already been made. Don't forget use Internet Explorer for the "fly around" experience.

Islamic Tile Patterns

Today we have been learning about the beginnings of Islam. The children made these Islamic tile designs using PhotoShop. We first designed  a pattern for one tile on paper. This was scanned into the computer and then coloured, repeated and rotated to make the final design.

By L

By R

By L

Timelines

By L

Today the children made these timelines using this fab and free tool from Read, Write, Think.

By R

Pong on Scratch

The kids have been using Scratch to make games. If you don't see the game below please wait a while, they take a little time to load. Click the green flag to start.

Online Learning

R using Open2Study

Lately we have been trying out lots of different websites for online learning. We have found that those aimed at children are almost universally full of idiotic cartoons and dumbed down beyond belief. There are however a couple of exceptions:

Maths Online is a subscription based website for maths that we have been using for several years. It covers maths from K to year 12 with explanatory videos and interactive questions. They also do a home education 60% discount.

Another free website we have been using is Big History. This covers history from the big bang all the way up to the present day, featuring videos, articles, quizzes and a teachers guide for further activities.

The free Khan Academy is another website that has been around for a while. Aimed at older kids and adults it mostly covers maths and computer programming with a smattering  of the other subjects.

Perhaps the best website for children that we have found is Scratch. This is a free computer programming site used in UK schools, you can download the software for free.  There's also a teachers guide with several lessons and links to programs you'll need. We have also found a fabulous book at our library with more programs and activities to do with Scratch.

Here is an example of what the children have made with it so far:

By L

By R

There are several websites that offer free courses aimed at adults. Some of these courses are also suitable for children and benefit from the lack of patronising graphics and dumbed down content.

Our favourite by far has been courses from the Open University (UK) on FutureLearn. You can see what we got up to on their basic science course in these previous posts:

Here
Here
Here
Here
and Here

There are many other universities offering free courses on FutureLearn, some suitable for older children.

L using Khan

For free courses from OU Australia try the Open2Study website. R has been enjoying the chemistry course.

More free courses of all different levels can be found on Coursera, which has everything from science to music, art to maths, computing, history, languages and more.

For free courses and tutorials in computer software you could try GCF. This website covers Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and more.

There are many other providers of online learning out there, but the quality varies enormously. I've given you links for those I consider to be the best providers. Enjoy your learning and please share below if you find any other websites worth exploring.

Pop Art Portraits

The children made these pop art style portraits using PhotoShop. You can view the excellent tutorial we used from Blue Lightening TV.

Starting from SCRATCH

The children have been learning computer programming with the free Scratch program. Click on the green flags to start. Try pressing the space bar whilst it's running.

By L

By R

What's Inside The Computer?

This week in IT lessons L was learning about the insides of the computer. Here they are all looking inside the PC.

Camden Logo

This is our council's logo. We thought we would make our own version. First the children brainstormed ideas for images associated with Camden. This included buildings, transport, landscape and wildlife. They tried out 6 small design ideas with paper and pencil. Next they took their favourite design to the computer and used Photoshop to make a flag. L chose a black swan for her image. R chose to represent the landscape features in Camden; the river, roads and countryside. Here are their designs.

By L

By R

Camden - Local Land Use

This week we have been looking at land use maps and making our own. Your local council website should have resources displaying this type of information for your local area. Links for Camden are at the bottom of the page.

First we talked about the different ways that land is used. The children were provided with pictures of different buildings and other types of land use to sort into groups. You can print out many pictures from Sparklebox or just Google images. They had categories such as shops, houses, factories, parks etc. I introduced new vocabulary such as residential, industry and infrastructure.

Next we discussed what land use maps show and examined a map from our local council. We talked about the reasons for different land use such as proximity to transport, raw materials, type of landscape etc. I explained that we were going to make a land use map of a small section of our local area. The children were provided with base maps and they decided the colours for their key. We went into town and walked around marking the various land use categories on our maps. We talked about reasons for the type of land use and changes that had happened in the past along with changes happening now.

Back at home the children used Photoshop to colour a base map to make a really professional looking map (top of page). We used the key to add photographs from the street to the correct locations.

We also used the council website to look at and compare transport maps, bushfire danger maps and flood maps.

Here are some links if you are studying Camden.:

Camden suburb maps
Camden Land Use maps
Camden flood map
Camden bushfire maps
Camden bus map

Camden Brochure

The children have been working with Dad on these colourful tourist information brochures for Camden. They used PowerPoint to make a double sided, tri-fold leaflet featuring photos and text about Camden. They look really professional don't you think?

The purple brochure above is by L. R's brochure in green is below.

First Day At School - NOT!

Start of the "school day"

There are 2 schools on our road; a primary and a secondary. The Kindergarten students start school today. L is 6 this year and would be starting with them if she wasn't home educated. Our first day at school (NOT!) did start a little earlier than usual, we were up at perhaps the same time as those going to school, woken early by the wildlife on the camp-site. I think the children's expressions show that it's a little earlier than they are used to, no 6am starts to the school run here thanks very much!

Camp breakfast

We were down at Canberra, making the most of school kid free attractions. First stop was the very under publicised Geoscience Australia education centre. At the centre you can visit the foyer with its mineral collection and the outdoor discovery walk any weekday. Visits to the education room are allowed any time they don't already have a school visit - just email and ask when. Best of all the centre has free admission and very friendly staff. Add a cafe and reasonably priced shop and what more do you need?

We knew it was going to be a scorcher of a day, around 40C, so we did the discovery walk before it got too hot. This walk around the grounds of the centre is a little over a km and is in fact a scale timeline from the formation of the earth through to the present day. Modern humans are represented by just a few cm. Along the walk are typical rock types from the era along with fossils of organisms alive at the time. I was surprised just how much L was into this and looking for crystals and fossils in the giant slabs of rock.

Petrified tree

Fascinated by huge mica crystals

Banded iron stone

After the walk we entered the building. There are many cases of beautiful crystals and several large specimens in the foyer. Ask the friendly staff for a treasure hunt sheet.

In the discovery room we touched lots more rocks, minerals and fossils. The children looked at specimens under ultraviolet light and through microscopes. There were some experiments  to do such as floating pumice, finding magnetic rocks and testing for porosity. There's lots of information on display in the room and leaflets, posters and models to take away with you.

A favourite specimen

Jigsaw of the Earth's plates

Testing for porosity

What is sand made from?

After that we tried the cafe which is reasonable priced as it seems to double as the staff canteen. We decided that it would be a great place to work when we saw that they have a board game club every other week!

For more science we headed along to Questacon for some hands on experiments. We also caught the collision show hosted by a mad scientist.

Is the crown made of real gold?

Concentration face

Spin art

Video microscopes

After that it was time to head back to camp for a swim in the pool to cool down. So L's first day of school was full of learning and not a text book in sight!