I'm Beulah Walker and I team teach with Kim Choice
a grade seven class
at St Saviour's Primary School in Toowoomba.
In teaching literacy in Year 7,
we try to encourage the children to write more complex sentences
and to put more detail into their writing.
Year 7 being part of the primary school in Queensland at this stage,
we need to prepare them for the increased demands of their writing,
the expectations that will be made of them when they reach high school.
Right, everyone, you have created an information report.
Do you remember when we did classification of animals in science?
We converted that information into an information report
which you've written, you drafted it
Once we'd conferenced about your draft and we'd corrected errors,
you publicised a final copy.
We're now going to use that information to do our storyboard
which is preparing us for a Kid Pix multi-modal presentation.
So remember that your audience is a young child
so the sentences need to be really short, really crisp.
So if you read through it
you need to think of the important points in that story -
what do you really want to stress -
and try to condense it completely into one short sentence.
Could it be, "Olivia is a mammal and..." Wait.
"Olivia is a mammal in the animal kingdom
"and she's also an omnivore."
Alright, but now maybe we don't need "mammal in the animal kingdom,"
maybe we can just say "a mammal" because obviously she's an animal.
And perhaps you need to explain what an omnivore is, just briefly.
So try again.
"Olivia is a mammal, and she's also an omnivore
"and an omnivore is what eats meat and plants."
Good girl.
I'm fairly new to the use of technology in the classroom,
but this year at St Saviour's we've had a whole school focus
on including more technology within our teaching.
So my teaching partner and I have really embraced this
and have looked for ways where we can include it.
KIM: In Year 7, we've been using the ICT toolkit,
and we've chosen Kid Pix from that toolkit.
We've found it was a very relevant program to use with our students
to develop what they needed for their multi-modal presentation.
So today is where it gets exciting
because we're going to transform your storyboard
into a Kid Pix multi-modal program.
With each slide or screen that they create here,
they've had to make choices and decisions
about backgrounds, text, layout,
which they need to take into consideration for a younger audience.
Now, what happens is down the bottom you get all different categories.
So what do you think is the most appropriate category there
that would suit our information?
-Nature, probably. -Nature, alright.
So click on Nature, Christina.
Giving students of this age some independence
to take ownership of their own learning
leads to great things,
and they actually not only teach each other
but also teach us as the teachers.
Today's lesson went really well. I was really happy with it.
The students were really engaged and creative
and just picked things up really quickly with this Kid Pix program,
so I'm really excited to be able to integrate this type of thing
across all our other learning areas as well.