Day 3

Use adjectives to describe the treehouse.

• Describe the treehouse using describing and opinion adjectives. You can also use similes.

• Describe who you think may live in the threehouse. Think about how big they would be.

• Take a look at the current Scrabble points system. What do you notice? What do you wonder?

• Find a recent newspaper, magazine or book. Choose a paragraph or page to analyse.

• Create a table to record your findings.

• For each letter in the text you are analysing, record the frequency in your table using tally marks.

• How many times was each letter used in the text you investigated?

• What do you notice about the frequency of the letters on your tally sheet?

  • Does anything surprise you?

  • Which letters were you expecting to be used most? Or least?

• Look at the letters that are most frequent (have the highest number) and least frequent (have the lowest number). Compare your data with the original Scrabble scoring system.

  • Are there any similarities?

  • Are there any differences?

• Using your Scrabble stats findings, identify which letters you think should now be given the highest and lowest scores.

It's your turn to investigate!

Mathematicians think logically when solving problems. You could use this by testing out a number of different options. For example, test what the sum is when you combine these quantities:

• 1, 6, 11, 16

• 1, 6, 12, 15

• 1, 7, 10, 16

• 1, 7, 12, 14

• 1, 8, 10, 15

• 1, 8, 11, 14

• Investigate what happens with this magic trick if you created a 5 x 5 table.

• Explore which mental computation strategies are the most efficient when adding and subtracting.

• Find a special place and close your eyes. Don’t make a noise, only to listen to the sounds around you.

• Think about what you hear and what those sounds represent. Are they normally there or are they something unusual?

• Record some of these sounds on a device. These may just be single sounds or they may be a collection.

• If you are using multiple sounds, consider how they could be arranged or organised to tell a story.

For example: "I recorded the sound of the trees blowing in the wind and then the sound of a person walking because children at our place like playing around in the trees. The children's voices are loud and high pitched because they were shouting at each other."

• Start with a steady beat and make a rhythm to go with it.

• Keep the beat (steady and stays the same) on one leg and improvise the rhythm on the other (changes like the words of a song).

• Once you have a steady beat there are lots of different ways to explore rhythms, including:

• repeating a rhythm over and over

• repeating the rhythm and adding a new part each time so it gets longer and longer

• doing it forwards and backwards

• using the rhythm of some words to guide you.

• Use different objects to make your sounds (e.g. a ruler, pens or boxes).

• Record your sounds using a recording device.

• Think of all the places that you hear a steady beat and try to improvise some rhythms to play along with that beat (e.g. the indicator in a car, the ticking of a clock).

• Graphically notate your favourite rhythm so that you can remember it later or share it with others.

• Listen to some other samples of program music that tells a story, such as:

  • ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ by Grieg

  • ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ by Mussorgsky

  • ‘Peter and the Wolf’ by Prokofiev.