So, if you are a regular reader of LA20’s blog or of my professional blog, Open Educator, please feel free to read the next installment of student posts and leave a probing or observational comment. This will help push our understanding as we strive to understand our inquiry question and take our learning beyond the walls of our classroom.

Check out - Adri17,  Amarildo, AnaC7, Azza11, Benny1000,  Flimmy, Jacko99, JFS, kostas11, KT08, langer11, Pavlo, Stac08, Stewy, Vic101 and yabby.

Hopefully, the rest of the class will get their posts up before we head off on camp on Wednesday.

I’ll give you three as examples (but that means these cannot be used by anyone else in the class).

1. The Akubra hat.
These hats are great and uniquely Australian because they are quite different from cowboy hats as seen in America. They are made from rabbit fur which is useful because it helped reduce the number of rabbits in Australia, which have at times grown to plague proportions here down under. For more information, try the official website.
http://flickr.com/photos/michaelsphotos/2352770948/

2. Lamingtons.
Created as a type of cake that is dipped in chocolate syrup and then rolled in coconut, this treat is a messy but tasty treat for sweet tooth Aussies.
http://flickr.com/photos/70253321@N00/2498100008/

3. The dismissal of Gough Whitlam.
In 1975, Gough Whitlam was the Labor leader and the Prime Minister of Australia when he and his government were dismissed by the then Governor-General, Sir John Kerr in one of the most controversial moments in Australian politics.

Over to you!

As well as investigating facts and understandings around our local dolphins we have been reading and discussing other information sources about dolphins around the world to see if there are any common ideas and connections between humans and dolphins. As one class member, Amarildo pointed out this morning, it is very interesting that humans seem to be most interested and concerned about water based mammals in preference to other species that are also impacted by humans. So, this morning, we watched an online video from the EarthOcean.tv site titled Disappearing Dolphins.

It looked at the impact of overfishing in the Ionian Sea on the dolphin population while the banning of fishing in the Amvrakikos Gulf has produced the opposite effect. There were many important points raised by the class which will be covered in their blog posts. What I want to write about now is how I followed a link out of the EarthOcean.tv website and learnt quite a bit more about a unique dolphin known as the Baiji.

The Baiji dolphin is a unique species of river dolphin, but it is feared that it may already be extinct. It lived in the Yangtze River in China and had evolved to be slow moving and with limited eyesight because the waters are so muddy.

Map of the Yangtze in China from Wikipedia.

Even this dolphin’s dorsal fin has evolved into a different shape and in 2006, a scientific expedition was held to try and establish if there were still any significant groups of Baiji dolphins left. I watched a video interview with a Californian scientist who went on that trip and they found no evidence of the Baiji at all, leading to the conclusion that the Baiji may already be extinct. Another link led to another news item where a Chinese local had videoed what he believed to a Baiji dolphin in 2007, raising some hope that there may be some of these unusual dolphins left. When I saw the video, I wasn’t too convinced of anything. What do you think?

The scientist on the expedition made some really good points about this issue. The extinction of animals like dolphins living close to humans is a real possibility especially when saving the animal is stacked up against economic issues like jobs. There are many people who will say it is more important to be able to feed their family than to save a species of dolphin. Especially in an area like the Yangtze River where there is a reasonable sized boat every 100 metres, it would seem that human priorities will win every time. Could this eventually happen here in Adelaide with our Port River Dolphins?

I hope not but you never know.

This is an interesting video that gives out some great examples of how fractions are used in real life - watch the first seven minutes as the final minutes refer to an online tutoring service. It is American and a little bit corny but maybe, you will see that fractions do have relevance to our daily experiences.

Here are a few websites that are useful for fraction practice.
Visual Fractions.
Number Nut - Fractions.

Click Here to take survey

A site with stacks of data - The Australian Bureau Of Statistics.

We apologise for the difficulties which you experienced yesterday. The response to World Maths Day was overwhelming and consequently many users experienced difficulties logging onto the site and with the game. World Maths Day continues until it is no longer the 5th of March anywhere in the world so children are able to continue playing. We have also decided to extend the time the site is available until the end of the next school week so students are still able to play. Our IT team is working their hardest to improve the system so that it is better able to cope with demand next year. We hope that you will register to participate again next year.

So that was great. Quite a few more LA20 students enjoyed the extra time - Kostas11, Samster and Langer11 were amongst the keenest participants - and their keenness has really paid off when we got the following email.

We pleased to announce that [LA20] have won a free subscription to Mathletics until the end of the school year. Mathletics is a complete mathematics learning platform, including both the arithmetic game used in World Maths Day and interactive curriculum activities covering most topics and all year levels. Mathletics provides many benefits for teachers and schools. Of greatest value is the continual formative assessment, which is used diagnostically to guide both class and individual instruction.

How great is that? I know that some parents were keen on the Mathletics website but were unsure if the cost of subscription would be worthwhile. Now using your Maths day username and password, you can access the full Mathletics website for the rest of 2008, and you and your parents  can work it out for yourselves.

Let me know in the comments here what you think. If your parents have any feedback, they can add that in here as well.

Well done, everyone!

  … a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a “moral”), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.

To help get your brain wrapped around the concept of a fable, I’ve included this YouTube video as a starting point.

Here are the links for some of the sites we will be using to examine famous and modern fables before we start the drafting of our own.

Simple Aesop’s Fables.
University of Massachusetts - Aesop’s Fables.
Fable Library.

We then created our own sequence of events based on a recent Sunday. Mr. Wegner gave us a demonstration on the IWB and we wrote our sequence into our Maths books. The next step came after Mr. Wegner came in with a pile of coloured strips of card for the next activity. He showed how to calculate the length of card to match the start time for each event in the sequence. Once everyone in the class had the idea, we got started and used our coloured card to create 24 hour coloured card strips to represent our Sundays. Check out the pics below to get an idea.

What was challenging:

• rounding off events to be in 15 minute segments to make it easier to cut strips to the correct length
• getting the day to match the correct length for 24 hours - 96 cm. Some people lost time and others had a 25 hour Sunday!
• sometimes segments were taped sideways and that affected the timeline’s length.