For the past eighteen months, Year 7 and 8 Science teachers Jaynelle LeFeuvre and Sarah Townsend have been involved in a pilot program being run by the Education Department looking at incorporating Aboriginal Perspectives into the Science curriculum.
The program has involved extensive research, many conferences, consultation with Narungga Elders, visits to local sites of significance and considerable work in preparing teaching resources for our students. The resulting resources were designed to fit within the Australian Curriculum Science framework and were recently trialled by our classes.
7 class trial
Our Year 7 class have been learning about how Classification helps organise the diverse groups of organisms that are on our planet. With an engaging visit to Newchurch Horticulture at Port Victoria they investigated the contributions of Aboriginal peoples’ knowledge in the identification of medicinal and endemic plants. We had fun exploring and learning about the native plants that grow in the Narungga limestone soils along with planting seedlings to rejuvenate the soil, processing parts of the plants and then incorporating them into traditional Aboriginal foods.
8 class trial
Our Year 8 Class have investigated the creation of Stone Tools as part of the ‘Rocks’ unit. They learnt about the features of different rock types found on the Yorke Peninsula, how they could be used as hammering or cutting tools and they then designed their own experiment to determine which rocks were the hardest and which were most suitable for grinding grain. It turns out that grinding grain by hand is a VERY tricky and time consuming process!
Check out the photos of our students in action!
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