Dr Claire | OpenSTEM Pty Ltd

This Week in HASS – term 1, week 7

This week our youngest students are looking in depth at different types of celebrations; slightly older students are examining how people got around in the ‘Olden Days’; and our older primary students have some extra time to finish their activities from last week.

Foundation to Year 3

In the stand-alone Foundation (Prep) unit (F.1), students are discussing celebrations – which ones do we recognise in Australia, how these compare with celebrations overseas, and what were these celebrations like in days gone by. Our integrated Foundation (Prep) unit (F.5) and students in Years 1 (1.1), 2 (2.1) and 3 (3.1), are examining Transport in the Past – how did their grandparents get around? How did people get around 100 years ago? How did kids get to school? How did people do the shopping? Students even get to dream about how we might get around in the future…

Years 3 to 6

At OpenSTEM we recognise that good activities, which engage students and allow for real learning, take time. Nobody likes to get really excited about something and then be rushed through it and quickly moved on to something else. This part of the unit has lots of hands-on activities for Year 3 (3.5) students in an integrated class with Year 4, as well as Year 4 (4.1), 5 (5.1) and 6 (6.1) students. In recognition of that, two weeks are allowed for the students to really get into making Ice Ages and mud bricks, and working out how to survive the challenges of living in a Neolithic village – including how to trade, count and write. Having enough time allows for consolidation of learning, as well as allowing teachers to potentially split the class into different groups engaged in different activities, and then rotate the groups through the activities over a 2 week period.

Oceanography and the Continents

Marie Tharp (30 July, 1920 – 23 August, 2006) was an oceanographer and cartographer who mapped the oceans of the world. She worked with Bruce Heezen, who collected data on a ship, mapping the ocean floor.

Tharp turned the data into detailed maps. At that time women were not allowed to work on research ships, as it was thought that they would bring bad luck! However, Tharp was a skilled cartographer, and as she made her maps of the floor of the oceans of the world, with their ridges and valleys, she realised that there were deep valleys which showed the boundaries of continental plates. She noticed that these valleys were also places with lots of earthquakes and she became convinced of the basics of plate tectonics and continental drift.

Between 1959 and 1963, Tharp was not mentioned in any of the scientific papers published by Heezen, and he dismissed her theories disparagingly as “girl talk”. As this video from National Geographic shows, she stuck to her guns and was vindicated by the evidence, eventually managing to persuade Heezen, and the scientific community at large, of the validity of the theories. In 1977, Heezen and Tharp published a map of the entire ocean floor. Tharp obtained degrees in English, Music, Geology and Mathematics during the course of her life. In 2001, a few weeks before her 81st birthday, Marie Tharp was awarded the Lamont-Doherty Heritage Award at Columbia University, in the USA, as a pioneer of oceanography. She died of cancer in 2006.

The National Geographic video provides an excellent testimony to this woman pioneer in oceanography.

The Week in HASS – term 1, week 6

HASS students have a global focus this week. The younger students are looking at calendars, celebrations and which countries classmates are connected to, around the world. Older students are starting to explore what happened at the end of the Ice Age and the beginnings of agriculture and trade. These students will also be applying the scientific method to practical examinations – creating their own mini Ice Ages in a bowl and making mud bricks.

Foundation to Year 3

Our standalone Foundation/Prep classes (F.1) are looking at calendars and celebrations this week, starting to explore the world beyond their own family and gain an identity relative to each other. Integrated Foundation/Prep (F.5) and Year 1 (1.1) classes; as well as Year 1 (1.1), 2 (2.1) and 3 (3.1) classes are examining our OpenSTEM blackline world map and putting coloured dots on all the countries that they and their families are connected to, either through relatives, or by having lived there themselves. It is through this sort of exercise that students can start to understand the concept of the “global family”.

Year 3 to Year 6

Students in years 3 (3.5), 4 (4.1), 5 (5.1) and 6 (6.1) are consolidating their learning and expanding into subjects, such as Science and Economics and Business. The ever-popular Ice Ages and Mud Bricks activity links to core Science curricular strands and allows students to explore their learning in very tactile ways. Whilst undertaking the activity, students make a mini Ice Age in a bowl, attempting to predict what will happen to their clay landscape when it is flooded and frozen, and then comparing these predictions to their recorded observations, during empirical testing. Students also make their own mud bricks by hand, once again predicting how to make the bricks strongest and testing different construction techniques. We have even had classes test the strength of their mud brick walls under simulated flood conditions, working inside a tidy tray.

Students move on from studying the Ice Age, looking at what happened as the climate changed and global sea levels rose. The pressures that these changes brought to people’s lives is examined by looking at the origins of agriculture with domestic plants and animals. Students consider how people needed to wok together to survive. The cooperative Trade and Barter activity allows students to role play life in a Neolithic village. Faced with a range of challenges, such as floods and droughts, students discover how to prioritise their needs for food to survive the winter, against their wants. They also discover that trade, counting and writing all grew out of the needs for people to exchange items and help each other to survive. This activity covers all the basic concepts in the Economics and Business curriculum, whilst providing a context that is meaningful to the students and their own experiences. Replicating the way that people developed trade, counting and writing in the historic period, the students’ experiences during the Trade and Barter activity lay the foundations for a deeper understanding of the basic concepts of Economics and Business.

This Week in HASS – term 1, week 5

This week students are exploring a vast range of topics, across the year levels. From using a torch and a tennis ball to investigate how the Earth experiences Day and Night to case studies on natural disasters, celebrations and indigenous peoples, there is a broad range of topics to spark interest.

Foundation to Year 3

Our youngest students (Foundation/Prep – Unit F.1) are talking about where they, and other members of their family, were born. Once again, this activity gets them interacting with maps and thinking about how we represent locations, whilst reinforcing their sense of identity and how they relate to others. Students in Years 1 to 3 (Units 1.1, 2.1 and 3.1) are using a torch and a tennis ball to investigate how the Earth experiences Night and Day, Seasons, Equinoxes and Solstices. This activity ties in what we experience as weather, seasons and their related celebrations to the Physics of how it all works, allowing students to draw connections between what they experience and what they are learning, and providing essential context for the more abstract knowledge. Teachers can easily tailor this activity to the needs of each class and explore the concepts in as much detail as required.

Years 3 to 6

Students in Years 3 to 6 (Units 3.5, 4.1, 5.1 and 6.1) are looking at a range of different case studies pertinent to their year-level curriculum requirements, this week. Year 3 students are examining celebrations in Australia and around the world (the Celebrations Around the World resource has been updated this year, and contains some new material, please check that you have the latest copy, and re-download it if necessary) and Year 4 students examine areas of natural beauty in Australia. Year 5 students are looking at the effects of natural disasters, especially here in Australia. Case studies on floods, such as the Brisbane Floods of 1893, and bushfires, such as the infamous Black Friday fires in Victoria, are available for more in depth study by teachers and students wishing to explore the topic in more detail. Year 6 students are examining Indigenous groups of people from Australia and Asia. A range of case studies are available for this topic, from groups within Australia, holding Native Title, such as the Quandamooka People, to groups from the mountains of Southern China, such as the Yi people. The larger number of case studies available, which can be found in our store resource category Indigenous Peoples, allows for Year 6 students to pursue more individual lines of enquiry, suited to their developing abilities.

This Week in HASS – term 1, week 4

This week the Understanding Our World program for primary schools has younger students looking at time passing, both in their own lives and as marked by others, including the seasons recognised by different Aboriginal groups. Older students are looking at how Aboriginal people interacted with the Australian environment, as it changed at the end of the Ice Age, and how they learnt to manage the environment and codified that knowledge into their lore.

Foundation to Year 3

This week our standalone Foundation classes (Unit F.1) are thinking about what they were like as babies. They are comparing photographs or drawings of themselves as babies, with how they are now. This is a great week to involve family members and carers into class discussions, if appropriate. Students in multi-age classes and Years 1 to 3 (Units F.5, 1.1, 2.1 and 3.1) , are examining how weather and seasons change throughout the year and comparing our system of seasons with those used by different groups of Aboriginal people in different parts of Australia. Students can compare these seasons to the weather where they live and think about how they would divide the year into seasons that work where they live. Students can also discuss changes in weather over time with older members of the community.

Years 3 to 6

Older students, having followed the ancestors of Aboriginal people all the way to Australia, are now examining how the climate changed in Australia after the Ice Age, and how this affected Aboriginal people. They learn how Aboriginal people adapted to their changing environment and learned to manage it in a sustainable way. This vitally important knowledge about how to live with, and manage, the Australian environment, was codified into Aboriginal lore and custom and handed down in stories and laws, from generation to generation. Students start to examine the idea of Country/Place, in this context.

New Research on Our Little Cousins to the North!

Last year, several research papers were published on the ongoing excavations and analysis of material from the island of Flores in Indonesia, where evidence of very small stature hominins was found in the cave of Liang Bua, in 2003. The initial dates dated these little people to between 50,000 and about 14,000 years ago, which would have meant that they lived side-by-side with anatomically modern humans in Indonesia, in the late Ice Age. The hominins, dubbed Homo floresiensis, after the island on which they were found, stood about 1m tall – smaller than any group of modern humans known. Their tiny size included a tiny brain – more in the range of 4 million year old Australopithecus than anything else. However, critical areas of higher order thinking in their brains were on par with modern humans.

Baffled by the seeming wealth of contradictions, these little people raised, researchers returned to the island, and the cave of Liang Bua, determined to check all of their findings in even more detail. Last year, they reported that they had in fact made some mistakes, the first time around. Very, very subtle changes in the sediments of the deposits, revealed that the Homo floresiensis bones belonged to some remnant older deposits, which had been eroded away in other parts of the cave, and replaced by much younger layers. Despite the samples for dating having been taken from close to the hominin bones, as luck would have it, they were all in the younger deposits! New dates, run on the actual sediments containing the bones, gave ages of between 190,000 to 60,000 years. Dates from close to the stone tools found with the hominins gave dates down to 50,000 years ago, but no later.

The researchers – demonstrating a high level of ethics and absolutely correct scientific procedure, published the amended stratigraphy and dates, showing how the errors had occurred. At another site, Mata Menge, they had also found some ancestral hominins – very similar in body type to the ones from Liang Bua, dated to 700,000 years ago. Palaeoanthropologists were able to find similarities linking these hominins to the early Homo erectus found on Java and dated to about 1.2 million years ago, leading researchers to suggest that Homo floresiensis was a parallel evolution to modern humans, out of early Homo erectus in Indonesia, making them a fairly distant cousin on the grand family tree.

Careful examination of the deposits has now also called in to question whether Homo floresiensis could control fire. We know that they made stone tools – of a type pretty much unchanged over more than 600,000 years, and they used these tools to help them hunt Stegodon – an Ice Age dwarf elephant, which was as small as 1.5m at the shoulder. However, researchers now think that evidence of controlled fire is only in layers associated with modern humans. It is this cross-over between Homo floresiensis and modern humans, arriving about 60,000 – 50,000 years ago, that is a focus of current research – including that of teams working there now. At the moment, it looks as if Homo floresiensis disappears at about the same time that modern humans arrive, which sadly, is a not totally unlikely pattern.

What does this have to do with Australia? Well, it’s always interesting to get information about our immediate neighbours and their history (and prehistory). But beyond that – we know that the ancestors of Aboriginal people (modern humans) were in Australia by about 60,000 – 50,000 years ago, so understanding how they arrived is part of understanding our own story. For more case studies on interesting topics in archaeology and palaeontology see our Archaeology Textbook resources for Year 11 students.