Each year I take Y12 out to the Waitakere Ranges to learn about stratification and collect data for their first (and easiest) internal.
This year was the last year that Peter and Jean King will be our guides, as they are retiring.
What students don't know is that these two also go out of their way to be my moderators for this standard, as I've always been the lone biology wolf of Tamaki College.
Whenever I arrive at their house in the bush the kettle is on, Poppy greets me by wagging her whole body, and there's always some fresh baking to nibble on as we mark.
I've been very lucky to be surrounded by supportive people in so many areas outside the school in the last 6 years. Thanks for the great trips Peter and Jean! xx
At least Isabella has been consistent in having her eyes closed in photos year XD
This year I enrolled both Y12 and Y13 into the L3 Trends in Human Evolution exam. This of course required a trip to the zoo, where students got to handle skeletons and bone tools before exploring the zoo.
Part of the purpose is to make notes on the differences between current ape bodies and movements, and humans. Unfortunately the zoo was under construction this year, but it looks to be open and will be completely fabulous around December this year.
You always know it was a great day when 80% fall asleep on the bus back.
During the holidays - on my birthday - I went to the WTE National Writing Conference and the keynote in the morning alone was worth getting up early for.
I took all my notes on a Presentation, which is here for you to view below or view at this link.
I absolutely have used these sentence-types in class. With the juniors I ran whole lessons around casting sentence types, to try and improve their writing.
The other thing I was absolutely blown away by was the way that we present students their assessment tasks. We've been giving them THOUSANDS of words to decipher and try to work out what to do before they even begin writing the assessment.
At the writing conference we sat down in groups with a real 1800-word, Level 3 PE task and all tried to work out what it was asking us to do, and how to get Excellence, and which parts were important.
Then Ian presented us with a single A4-sized task. It had exact word limits and included clear instructions on what students must include to gain top grades. We didn't have to guess what was meant! Why does it have to be a mystery what we want students to do? When he took his single A4 sheet to an NZQA moderators meeting (there were 40 of them there) they were bamboozled - they thought that's what everyone was giving students! The TKI tasks are not meant for kids' eyes!
Ian said the best way to make these amazing tasks is to write your own Excellence exemplar, and then see how many words you have apportioned to each section of the task. Set students a word count (as they would have in University, anyway!), and provide headings for each section. Provide clearly worded prompts about what to include. You can see two examples of this that he provided, in the presentation above.
Today in Y12 biology our lesson was in two parts; learning about the structure of a chloroplast first, followed by learning the stages of photosynthesis.
To help with learning how to draw and label a chloroplast we made play-doh models of them, using different colours to represent different structures.
For all of the models (bar one) green is used to represent the thylakoid discs stacked into granum (the plural for these is grana), because the thylakoid discs are where chlorophyll is found. Chlorophyll is the pigment responsible for absorbing red and blue wavelengths of light for energy and reflecting back green wavelengths, which gives plants their green colour.
After the class was comfortable with the structures inside a chloroplast they were ready to move on and learn about how photosynthesis happens in two of these structures; the thylakoids and the stroma.
Students will have to work hard filing this away in their long term memory in a way that makes sense to them; drawing diagrams of the process, explaining it out loud, teaching others, or writing the story of photosynthesis in their own words. This is one of those concepts where I can be around to answer questions but I can't physically MAKE students learn it, and when it becomes tricky they need the resilience to wrestle on!
