Week 4 - Inspiration Dreamtime Stories and Excel

Today we looked at Dust Echoes on the ABC website. This was a fantastic site which played Aboriginal dreamtime stories. I think it's a fantastic medium to get students looking at Aboriginal stories and showing them the stories in a way that they will understand. It also lends itself to activities such as creating a story board like the one I've created below and then asking the students to write the story themselves. You could make the activities as easy or difficult as you wanted depending on the age of your students. The site also provides a glossary of Aboriginal words which is a great way of helping the students to understand the terms being used and to learn more about the Aboriginal culture.















We also looked at graphs in excel today and discussed activities that we could use in the classroom. Excel is a thinking tool that lends itself to integrating domains such as maths, ICT, literacy. You could ask students to graph something like the different colour cars they count driving past the school, write a paragraph to explain their findings, print their graph and present the two pieces together. I haven't used excel for years so I refreshed my skills and picked up a few new tips such as how to colour code each bar on the graph and how to add in images to enhance the quality of my work. These skills are something you would have to cover step by step with the students, possibly on numerous occassions but they're valuable skills.

Now days a lot of children have allergies so you wouldn't have to use chocolate M & M's, you could easily use counters or colour bits of paper and divide them among the students rather than using food.