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| 7 Wonders clipart (c) Phillip Martin |
While digging through an old file (as I slow organise and burn them to CD) I came across some photos from a few years ago.
I taught in this particular composite 6/7 class for one term. They were a fairly sheltered bunch in the sense they attended a very small school and had limited exposure to different teachers - including teaching technique, style and expectations. I never apologise for the fact I have high expectations of students - how else will they challenge themselves?
The piece of work I am going to discuss was a part of an Ancient Civilisations unit. The earlier post was about the dioramas (CLICK HERE to read that one) they created. Each student did a research project that required them to find out about the general culture of the civilisations they were asked to research - this they presented as a PowerPoint but I kept none as 99.9% of all content was cut and pasted from the Internet (despite each one taking notes and despite discussing with them about keywords and plagiarism!).
Based on the information they gathered about food they needed to design a banquet/feast and an invitation. The invitation and menu were meant to be a matching set and the food did need to be authentic to the country. In the lead up we had already looked a lot at colours, design elements and evaluated other invitations and menus.
I must say that overall I was disappointed with the results. I had completed 3 examples to demonstrate different techniques but to be honest, this class just were not use to putting in effort. They were so accustomed to meeting their regular teacher's standard (I mean meeting = the bare minimum to pass) that they feel well short of a grade 6 or 7 standard. Many of the students found their first year of high school (at a nearby town much larger) the following year extremely difficult due to the low-standard and expectations of quality and effort which did not come up to scratch at the larger school.
Back however to the results. I had planned for this task to be completed in a two week period allowing for art, design and technology, and computing lessons - a total of 3 per week (6 lessons in total of 45 mins each). It should have been plenty!
Here are the best of the bunch (some details have been erased for privacy reasons)....
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| This grade 7 student got the matching part correct, included all necessary details, and the theme resembled her civilisation. |
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| Ancient Civilisation Menu by a grade 7. Simple and complete. |
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| Grade 6 invitation. This was a Viking theme. |
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| Grade 6 menu. This was also based on the Viking theme |
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