PROJECT TITLE: Avatar Asia & Money Music/Buried Treasure

(Term 2 and Term 3, 2024)

School Name: Northcliffe District High

Teacher’s Name: Mariana Tosh

Year Group:5/6/7/8/9

Number of students:9

Creative’s Name: Peter Hill

Main Curriculum Focus: Term One Hass Geography, Term Two Hass Economics

Cross-curricular Links: Music, Visual Art, History, Technology, Creative writing/poetry

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Context

Northcliffe is a very small regional district high school that has been shrinking in size for many years. The small size and therefore large range of ages in a class makes for some challenges for the teacher working with several curricula.

WHAT WE DID  

Project overview

Over terms two and three Mariana and I collaborated on two Hass subjects, Geography in term two and Economics in term three.

Essentially term two revolved around our students creating an avatar/character they could use in a series of games where the world map was the board and google earth was the main tool for navigating and exploring the asia pacific region through a variety of missions.

After a couple of weeks I realised that the school has had a music focus in the past but that the current students have no school tuition or exposure to music. To maximise what I could offer the students we used music, rhyming and rapping as a vehicle for reflection on our geography content.

In Term two we decided to continue on with the interest shown in Music and have it as our main vehicle for learning about economics. We researched songs about money and tried to break down the lyrics into terms and concepts related to economics. Running parallel to our exploration into economic concepts and definitions we continued to use music as a vehicle for reflection but also to give the students an opportunity to use the musical equipment the school had accumulated over the years it had designated music teachers.

This proved to be a little problematic and ambitious with nowhere near enough time available for the students to learn enough musical theory and skills for them to achieve what they wanted to in the short term.

A confluence of factors created a loss of momentum and general disengagement by the students, particularly the older ones in term three. To counter this we decided to pivot and change direction to try and maximise the last four weeks. We changed our focus by bringing it back to Northcliffe and creating a story about a past principal, creating treasure maps for a variety of assets that had been buried on the school grounds for forty years. A treasure hunt that found cash, gold, a house title and shares. This was a fun way for us to talk about the devaluing of the dollar, inflation and asset wealth appreciation.

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How did we make the curriculum come alive?

Over the course of the two terms we tried to use various mechanisms to help bring the curriculum alive. Finding ways to make it relevant to who they are and where they live.

On a technical level we used many ways of reframing the information by using game formats, lots of use of random generators for unusual combinations. In term one we got our group to work on the year six curriculum focus, the asia pacific region. This made sense for us with two siblings in the group having a mother originally from Japan so we had a point of relevance for them. This allowed us to have a point of relevance for the students with a direct or indirect connection to one country in the region.

Even with some knowledge of Japan in our group I was quite astonished by the lack of knowledge of the asia pacific region. There was some knowledge of Indonesia through Indonesian language lessons but otherwise it was a completely blank canvas to work with.

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How did we make the 5 Habits of Learning come alive?

All of our education delivery was project based which allowed for all of the 5 learning habits to come alive. Discussing the separate learning habits within our reflection was the most direct way we increased the students' awareness.

Collaboration is both challenging and essential with such a small group. When more and more of the education delivery at regional schools is online learning the importance of in classroom collaboration is vital. Ensuring that there were plenty of projects where the students worked together helped to develop their collaboration skills.

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How did we activate student voice and learner agency?

In the first sessions of term two we encouraged the students to share as many stories, information and/or connections they had to the countries of the asia pacific region. This was especially true for the two siblings who had visited their relatives in Japan.

By being flexible we were able to run with a casual comment/suggestion by one of the older students. This student suggested the idea of trying out their treasure maps with the year 3 and 4 class. This worked incredibly well on many levels. Our students were able to see how effective their maps and clues were on a new group who had not been involved in the making of them. It also allowed for us to have a bigger class for a day which made it much easier to get the class energy levels up.

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WHAT WAS THE IMPACT?

The creative schools program challenged the small number of year 5,6 and high school students to push beyond their sheltered routine. In some ways the fact that part of term three was quite difficult was an indicator of this. A couple of students were determined to do as little as possible at school and they were dragging the others down with them.It was harder for them to do this when the classroom had steered away from tick the box style education.

Anecdotally I have heard the students recall real world economic concepts learnt in our sessions that they will most likely now carry through into adulthood. Whether this would be the case through a conventional dissection of economics is unknown.