Leadership
Thinking Blogs this week involves four thinking questions about leadership.
Here is a link to listen to former Captain of the Australian Cricket Team, Mark Taylor, talking about leadership:
https://www.eduweb.vic.gov.au/dlr/_layouts/DLR/Details.aspx?ID=8509
1. What is leadership? Explain.
2. “While great leaders may be rare, everyone has leadership potential.” Do you agree? Why/why not?
3. Throughout history, the world has seen many people who possessed a variety of attributes that made them highly effective leaders. What characteristics do you think effective leaders often possess?
4. What characteristics do you possess that might help you to be an effective leader in the future?
Thinking | Comments (13)Technology Vs Creativity
This week’s thinking questions relate to recent technological devices that take up much of our time; gaming consoles and computers.
When our parents were kids they never had consoles or computers to use or play with. They had to make do with TV and playing outside all the time.
Lots of people say that consoles and computers make kids less smart and less creative because they don’t have to interact and manipulate objects or physically move things in order to participate.
Do you think consoles/computer games make kids less creative? Why? Why not? Give examples.
Do consoles/computer games make you smarter? Give examples.
Change
This week’s thinking questions focus on the concept of change.
Imagine a ship that has been built out of wood, and each time a part needs replacing it is replaced by metal parts. Eventually the entire ship is made out of metal.
Please provide explanations and use examples as part of your responses to the following thinking questions:
Is it the same ship as when it was wood?
If not then at what point did it become the new ship?
Is it a new ship when one plank has been changed? Why?
Is it only a new ship when all the planks have been changed? Why?
Does the ship change in between?
Thinking | Comments (4)Fungus Win Tables Footy Premiership
Congratulations to the Bloodsucking Fungus on winning the 2009 Tables Footy Premiership. It was a terrific Grand Final fought out between the Fungus and the Electric Eels. Both teams should be very proud of their efforts as all players put their best foot forward in front of a large, vocal crowd.
Well done to everybody on the hard training, wonderful teamwork and tremendous sportsmanship shown throughout this fantastic season.
Art – Thinking Blogs
This week’s thinking questions relate to the concept of ‘Art’.
Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist. He has spent the last 17 years of life devoted to designing and manufacturing wind powered, living sculptures.
His website is called:
The website includes information, films, photos, etc.
After watching film of Theo Jansen’s work and thinking about his work I want you to answer the following questions:
1- What is art? (especially to Theo Jansen)
2-Why do we have art?
3-What drives artists like Theo Jansen to continue their artwork?
You could talk about other examples of artists you know of, particularly living artists.
Tables Footy Grand Final Day
Congratulations to the Electric Eels and the Bloodsucking Fungus on qualifying for the 2009 Tables Footy Grand Final. It has been a long season andFriday 13th November will be a big celebration of all the magnificent fun we’ve had playing Tables Footy this year.
Remember, all parents are invited to come and support their favourite team on Friday as they play their final game of Tables Footy.
Tables Footy | Comments (13)Blogging News – 4X Wins Web 2.0 Award
The Education Department’s CONNECT site and The Librarians Association of Victoria held a Web 2.0 competition during term 3.
Teachers were encouraged to work in a team to develop an online collaborative project incorporating use of a blog and/or wiki or other web 2.0 technologies. Emphasis was on creative, innovative use of technologies and how they were used to engage students in learning in new ways.
The 4x classroom blog was awarded a prize – a Wii with heaps of games for the school. The prize reflects the 4x students’ ability to use their thinking skills and develop their own blogs as part of 4x’s thinking blogging.
Congratulations to all 4x students on your participation and hard work and hard thinking in order to achieve this special award.
Thinking Blogs – ‘Courage’
Your first blogging task is to think hard about courage.
What does courage mean to you?
Who is/has been courageous?
What is the result of courage?
Once you have thought about these questions, you need to come up with as many courage ‘keywords’ as possible and then create a’word cloud’ of your words using Wordle.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
Use this link to have a look at MY courage word cloud: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1273323/COURAGE
Feel free to use the edit/language/font/layout/colour options to personalize your word cloud. Once you have created your word cloud, click ’save to public gallery, type in a title and a username (use your blogging username) and post a link to it on your blog.
Good luck and have fun.
Thinking | Comments (3)Thinking Blogs – ‘Clash’
Our first thinking question is about clashing or disagreeing with other people. All of us clash with other people or friends or family members at certain times.
Here is the link to the animated video:
https://www.eduweb.vic.gov.au/dlr/_layouts/DLR/Details.aspx?ID=5035
These are your questions:
1- What is a friendship?
2- Can you be very different to someone else and still be friends?
3- Is there always right and wrong answers?
Thinking | Comments (2)Welcome
Welcome to the 5S Blog!
The 5S Blog is a place for us to develop our thinking skills as well as our writing skills. We blog here to express our thoughts, feelings and opinions on a variety of interesting topics. It is also a place for us to communicate with each other and discuss things.
Everyone can enjoy this space by viewing it and can contribute to it by leaving positive comments for your classmates, schoolmates or family members. All comments posted go directly to the administrator (Mr Santa) of the site for approval. Part of the blog being successful is the use of comments and we would love to see this embraced by our students and families.
This blog is a safe place for students to go on the internet where there will be links to various activities that relate to our classroom.
Enjoy!
Mr Santa
General | Comments (6)