Learning with the Commonwealth Games

Today we starting looking at the Commonwealth Games - what we already knew and what we wanted to know. This lead to some fairly low level - closed type questions from the kids. For example - When did they start? How many countries are in it?
I introduced the Social Sciences Level 4 Curriculum to the kids and explained that we needed to think much harder and much wider about what we wanted to know if we were going to meet the demands of the Curriculum.
After some discussion around society, people, cultures and communities, etc we came up with something that was worthy of Year 7 and 8 learning....

What -

We are learning about the impact the commonwealth games might have on the Gold Coast.

Why -

So that we can learn to think carefully and understand about issues in society and how they impact on all of us.

From here students will move into small groups and take this big idea and turn it into a smaller idea that they choose. They will be encouraged to think about things like - sustainability, waste, organisation, finances, impact on people, environment, etc.

It would be great if you could have some conversations at home around the impact - both positive and negative - as this will help students decide what aspect they wish to investigate.