WORKSHOP 4 - DUST ECHOES
Today in class I used Inspiration to create a story wall about a movie derived from the ABC website.
Above you will find the link to view the movie "Dust Echoes''. This story explores the importance and meaning of a dreaming-body to Indigenous Australians. The aboriginal people believed that there was a time where supernatural beings roamed the surface of the earth . Many were similar to the animals we see today such as kangaroo's emu's and big brown snakes.
Thousands of years ago these animals were said to be like humans, and some of them were said to be giant people. These beings were believed to travel across land with their laws, songs, ceremonies, stories and beliefs until they changed into the animals we know of today. Native animals are known to be sacred to Indigenous people today and this is the reason why. Aboriginal focus on conserving and protecting land and animals also for this reason.
In the aboriginal belief system, everyone has a dreaming body. Dreaming bodies are the human beings that lived on earth thousands of years ago and everyone is said to have a knowledge of who their dreaming body is. This story 'Dust Echoes' pictorally shows the transformations humans made from their dreaming bodies as an animal into human beings.
By using Inspiration to create a story board we were able to see this story evolve and progress pictorally. This is a fun activity for students to complete.
M & M's Candy Colour Chart
The graph above was created using Microsoft Excell. The graph shows the estimated number of each colour of M&M's in one packet. This excercise can be further extended to get students thinking about WHY there are only a particular amount of Green, Yellow, Blue, Orange or Brown M&M's in each packet. The activity can be further extended to look at the nutritional content of a packet of M&M's, wether there is a diference in the nutritional content between different colours of M&M's etc. Creating a graph is a great way for children to log their information about a given topic. The visual information enables them to simply analyse the differences in the data and draw conclusions from their work.
