Thursday, 1 August 2013

Alien Invaders

What a great team of Students we're working with!

Yesterdays session was about Alien Invaders...


The students were asked to spread themselves out in a circle and stand as still as a statue, as quiet as a mouse and listen carefully to the sounds of the school yard.

'I heard 3 different types of birds' said Mary. 'And I heard and aeroplane and a dog' said John.

There were many different sounds occurring and the students were able to talk about these sounds and think about how we can find out the types of animals we have in our school yard, just by listening quietly.

Then, I produced a space ship! (a wooden box with a lid) and told the students 'This is an intergalacic flying saucer from the planet Xenon' travelling to earth on a very important mission. It has flown around the world looking for a great place to land and decided that the grassy area in you school is the perfect landing pad'.

'Now that the spaceship has landed, I'd like each student to take it in turns telling a sentance in the story of the Aliens and what they got up to while at your school.'

So, each student held the talking stick, and added a sentence to the story...

Firstly, The aliens landed and came out of their ship.
There was Bacon on the ship that Kylie ate
The aliens got angry that students were eating their Bacon,
So they came out with their Ray Gun and 'vapourised' some students
Teachers were concerned so they came out to help and Mrs McCarthy got vaporised as well.

The Aliens yelled out 'We coming to take over your planet' and they started spreading out from the school.

Finally, the students teamed up and fought back against the aliens and everything went back to normal.

At the end of the story, I mentioned that I really do have aliens in the spaceship and ask the students 'would you like to see them?'.

I carefully opened the lid and pulled out a Plant - plantango lanceolata a common invasive weed in Australia. I explain that this plant was introduced to Australia and is now invading areas around Melbourne, just like the Aliens in our story.

This activity is one that we have been running for a number of years. It is a really great activity to run when you are creating a habitat area in your school to deepen students understanding of weed species and how and why we need to look at removing them.
-Andrew Stocker (Senior Coordinator Education Services)