*TERM+ONE*

This term we're investigating AUSTRALIAN INVENTIONS, including the common, everyday Hills Hoist to the more complex bionic ear. Our aim is to celebrate the inventors of yesterday as we become the inventors of tomorrow.

Our first activity was to come up with our definition of what is an invention....the students of 4KM came up with.....

//An invention is something new that someone has thought of and designed to help people and to make our lives easier. Inventions are patented so that they cannot be copied by anyone else. //

We've now brainstormed together in small groups and come up with the following categories of inventions that we're interested in learning about //...//
 * household
 * leisure
 * electronics
 * sport
 * inventors
 * energy
 * kitchen appliances
 * clothes
 * office
 * transport
 * outdoors
 * food
 * medical

Five of these categories will be covered in the teaching element of our unit, but students will also have the opportunity to individually choose three other categores that interest them to research and answer some of their own questions.

Some links to our Aussie inventions..... [|Coolgardie Safe]

 WEEKLY LITERACY ACTIVITIES Each week we will have a literacy activity that involves the wiki in some form. Some of these activities will have winners announced on this page for students who have shown the best effort.  WEEK FOUR & FIVE ACTIVITY  This is an introductory activity to familiarise yourself with how a wiki works. The aim is to create your own home page that introduces yourself to the rest of the 4KM Team. Experiment with pictures, text styles, sizes, colours and don't forget to tell us something about you. The pages that demonstrate the best effort will have their names published on this page...so stay tuned!!!

//And the winners are (drum roll)...... //

//Mitch and Kara!!! //

//It was an incredibly hard decision because everyone has put in such a great effort into their wiki pages. I chose these two pages as I felt they were extremely eye catching and demonstrated a lot of effort. Congratulations!!!! Remember your wiki pages don't stop here, keep adding to them and building on your wiki skills. //

WEEK SIX ACTIVITY

Click on the following link [|List of Australian Inventions] and write a short paragraph about an invention that interests you, explaining what the invention is, who invented it and why it has helped people or made our lives easier. Post your paragraph to the WEEK 6 post here - [|Discussion Link.] (Remember to type your paragraph into a word document first to help with spelling/grammar errors) Stay tuned for the winning posts....

Another tough week to pick winning posts from.... I chose the following two students as they focussed on rewriting the information they found on the webpages IN THEIR OWN WORDS - a //very// important skill I'm sure you would agree!

And the winners are.....

// Shakira and Gab!!!!! //

Congratualtions to you both - well done!!!

WEEK EIGHT ACTIVITY

Click on the following link .... [|Australian Inventions] and scroll down almost to the bottom, where you will find a list of Australian SPORT inventions. This time though you will need to do some extra research as there is very little information about them on this page. SUGGESTION: copy and paste the title of the Sport Invention that interests you and paste it onto another page/tab and use Google to research more information. Again, write a short paragraph IN YOUR OWN WORDS, discussing your AUSTRALIAN SPORTS INVENTION - especially the WHAT, WHO, WHERE AND WHEN. Remember to open a word document to help with your editing, before you post it as a reply to this week's discussion post here.... [|Week 8 Discussion Link]

And the winners are.....

//Imojean and Callum!!!!//

Well done to you both. I enjoyed reading everyone's pieces, however these two students focussed on writing IN THEIR OWN WORDS and aimed for a lot of detail when writing about their chosen Australian Sporting Invention. Well done!

<span style="background-color: #ff0000; color: #000080; display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 180%; text-align: left;">WEEK NINE & TEN ACTIVITY

For the next two weeks we are aiming to finish our Lotus Chart, so your computer activity is to research the three topics that interested you, which you wrote in your IS books at the beginning of term. For example, if you had put "transport" as one of the extra inventions topics, you could type in "Australian Transport Inventions" and something like the ute would come up for you to research. If you're getting stuck you can move on to other countries' inventions, but the majority of information in your lotus chart should be Australian. Remember you are after 6 FACTS & 2 PICTURES to fill in each of the 8 squares surrounding the 8 sub headings/topics.