Learning activities

National Science Week – an annual celebration of science and technology in Australia – is going to look a little different in schools this year due to COVID-19. The Australian Science Teachers Association coordinate school involvement in the event, and have had to make significant changes to what celebrations will look like this year.

Mathematics teacher Holly Millican shares three activities she uses in her classroom to support her lessons on ratio, and help students relate the concepts they’re learning to everyday scenarios.

In today’s reader submission Lanella Sweet, Extension and Enrichment Teacher at Wesley College in Melbourne, shares examples of classroom investigations designed to help students understand and develop their use of mathematical language, and its links with other areas of the curriculum.

At Teacher magazine, we love to share innovative and research-based classroom activities from educators across Australia and the world. In today’s podcast, we take take you through some of the engaging learning activities educators have been using during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As educators in Australia return to face-to-face teaching, and schools around the world grapple with new ways of working to provide continuing support to students during the pandemic restrictions, readers have been getting in touch to share what’s been happening in their own context.

A new series of research papers related to integrating science learning in the early years aims to help educators of children in preschool to Year 2 to incorporate the latest research into their teaching. In this podcast, we speak to the paper’s co-author Gayl O’Connor.

A new research-based series encourages early years educators to take advantage of everyday teaching and learning opportunities to improve young children’s scientific understanding, and shares four step-by-step activities for the classroom or learning at home.

In the second of two articles, Kate Coleman and Abbey MacDonald explore some of the resources to eventuate from the creative pressure cooker circumstances of the COVID-19 lockdown, and how they can be used to maximise studio time and learning into the future.

In the first of two articles, teacher educators Kate Coleman and Abbey MacDonald share practical examples of how visual arts teachers and artists transformed the ways they connected and communicated with students, and each other, during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown to ensure a continuity of learning.

ACER researchers Dr Amy Berry, Kellie Picker and Rachel Parker discuss some of the characteristics of playful learning at school, share examples of classroom practice, and explain how Australian teachers can contribute to our understanding of learning through play in the classroom.