Week 4 - 25th August 2011

THIS BLOG WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN AUGUST 2011, POSTS FROM THE FIRST 3 WEEKS WERE LOST AFTER THE BLOG WAS HACKED.  POSTS FROM WEEK 4 ONWARD WERE RECOVERED AND ARE REPOSTED HERE IN THEIR ORIGINAL FORM....

Thursday, 25 August 2011 Week 4 - The big field trip This week saw our field trip to the site of our proposed adventure play area. We decided this year to incorporate a 'real' trip to a 'real' local site, as a way of connecting the Mantle experience to the local community and environment. There was a little confusion when the permission slips were handed out to the children in the class .... By this time they are comfortable with the fact that this is an imagined commission. However, with the permission slips, some just needed to check "Do we actually take these home to our actual parents or...." For the teachers and student teachers, the field trip took quite a bit of organising, particularly in terms of ensuring that the activities that occurred in the space were of high quality and involved learning of an appropriate level. The student teachers took the challenge of being responsible for planning a task within a particular "testing zone" as shown below. They did really well at ensuring that the tasks were both professional tasks appropriate to the commission AND learning tasks appropriate to learning levels and curriculum requirements. In my next post I will talk about how it actually went! Professional task Some suggested activities