Friday, May 28th

Good morning!  Apologies for my absence – I won’t be far away from a Skype connection or this blog all day, so feel free to hit up the Skype account ashdalestp or simply comment this blog.

Last week’s relief notes came back suggesting that a bit of sneakiness went down in my absence, so please remember the way this class works.  As long as the tools you’re using are for a clear educational purpose and you’ve given the boss a heads-up that you’re doing it, you’re fine.

SCIENCE

Last lesson you guys made excellent progress on your Rock Cycle Character stories.  Keep them rolling.  Get it?  Rock… rolling… never mind.  Remember, they’re due Wednesday of next week.

TECHNOLOGY & ENTERPRISE

You’ve all got the CD cover art templates.  Get designing!!

SOCIETY & ENVIRONMENT

Let’s begin by refreshing our memories as to the difference between weather and climate. Weather is the state of the atmosphere at any given moment in time, with regard to temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind, humidity, precipitation, and cloudiness.  Climate is the average of weather conditions for a given location over a period of time.

Our job as Year 8 S&E students is to develop an understanding of how we can observe and measure climate.  The tool we use to do this is called a climograph.  I’ve uploaded some resources for you to download and work with.  They are as follows:

• A climograph of Minneapolis, Minnesota in the USA
• Activity questions that match the Minneapolis climograph
• A list of crucial climate vocabulary
• A climograph interpretation activity
• A blank climograph template

You’ll need to work through the first four, using the fifth one as backup.

MATHEMATICS

I’ve assigned you some decimal problem solving tasks in Mathletics.  Go Live for 10 minutes to warm your brains up, then hop in.

ENGLISH

Ok, so you’ve started on your “Lord of the Flies – Redux” reinterpretations of the novel.  By now you should have your details decided upon, and you should be under way in writing the synopsis.  The next step is to turn that synopsis into a plan for a movie trailer.  Use IMDB and YouTube to compare a movie synopsis and trailer for the same film to decide the following:

• How much of the plot do you give away in the trailer?
• How detailed do you want to be?
• Selection of detail – remember the ideas we talked about in creating intrigue in narrative.

Now as I said, if you’ve got any queries, comment the blog or Skype me.  If you finish up with anything project-based from the above, there’s a pile of other projects including your Ancient Egypt story animations to keep powering through with.

Do me proud, people.