This semester, much to their delight, junior primary classes are learning about volcanoes. It is a topic that students have asked to do for quite a while. When I first covered this topic many years ago, I bought a plastic model of a volcano.

It used to sit on a shelf behind my desk and was constantly drawing comments and requests from students. It now sits in my cupboard with my enormous dice which also piqued student curiosity!
Can you imagine their delight when it emerged from the cupboard and not only that, I opened it (not easy as the tabs fit so snuggly) and we then talked about the parts of a volcano. My students are full of questions about volcanoes and for the first time, I am not being the font of all knowledge. I am trialling the idea of putting our questions up onto twitter or putting the onus back on the students to help find the answers. With the first batch of questions, I have recorded them and we should be able to tick off a few now. Here are the questions from one of our reception classes:

After tomorrows lesson we should be able to tick off some.
This week, I wanted to incorporate some Indonesian language into a topic that has been largely conducted in English so far. We revised the terms we learned last week (magma chamber, vent, ash cloud & lava) through a great youtube video (Geography lesson: What is a Volcano) and then students worked collaboratively in groups to create a volcano using construction paper & Brenex squares. I explained that they had to decide as a group how they created the picture, the only thing that had to do was correctly affix the labels ‘gunung api’ & ‘lahar’.
The results are amazing and make a very colourful display!