The Bat and the Butterfly

My storyboard from "The Bat and the Butterfly"

Today's first task was to watch an Aboriginal dreamtime video from the ABC's Dust Echoes site and then re-tell the story using screenshots from the video. I chose "The Bat and the Butterfly", a story about a girl who is abducted and kept prisoner in a cave. Her family is unable to rescue her and eventually she turns into a butterfly to escape. Her kidnapper turns into a bat and chases her, but is chased back into the cave by her family.

The videos are actually great because they're not in a "storybook" format that children would be familiar with. Each video has different artistic styles (mine was claymation, Eliza's was more of an oil painted canvas) and the children will need to think carefully about what is happening. Once they have watched the video they need to identify the main events from the story, and create a diagram using Inspiration. My diagram was fairly basic, however others in the class designed some quite elaborate creations and it will be interesting to see what children come up with.

It's a useful exercise for the classroom to have children pinpoint key events, and filter for important information.


M & M's Maths

Clearly if you involve chocolate, 90% of your students are sold on the spot. (The other 10% are whinging about a friend of a friend who has a peanut allergy). Even 35 postgrad students were enthralled for minutes doing this activity.


There's an application for all age groups here. For the very young, simply sorting the candy into colours is helping to develop those logico-mathematical skills that form the basis of maths ability. Middle primary school students can colour in bar graphs to show the number of each colour, and talk about the results compared to the website statistics. 

For older primary students there is the opportunity to bring in some rich Excel work, and create colourful, annotated graphs with pictures and meaningful information. Eliza's chart was even prettier than mine, with pie pieces in 3D and in exploded view. The possibilities for children are fantastic, and having coloured M&Ms provides incentive to work out how to make each data set a specific colour. They can pull information from the M&Ms website and from other sources to include on their graph. 

While I understand that there are severely anaphylactic children in schools who cannot tolerate peanuts, I also think the world has gone a little mad (some schools have banned cooking altogether in panic). With the growth of healthy eating programs and schemes such as kitchen gardens, I think schools will eventually settle into a sensible plan for children. If there are peanut-allergic children in the class then obviously, this is an inappropriate activity, however otherwise I have no problem using it. 


Other suggestions for materials to use instead of M&Ms were alphabet soup mix (good, but 26 possibilities makes for a messy graph), Lego (fun - but I really like M&Ms website statistics of colour probability), and counters or play-money. You could even use something that kids like more, such as Beanz or footy cards, and this would also lead into studies of probability - eg if you buy 15 packets, what is the chance you'll get that one "special" one?