Visiting SA and WA

This week we began our imaginary journey around Australia with the book "Are We There Yet?" by Alison Lester. Early in the week we visited South Australia including such places as the Coorong, the Barossa Valley, the Flinders Ranges, Streaky Bay, Murphy's Haystacks, the Nullarbor Plain and Head of the Bight. I found photographs online to show the children what they places look like from different angles. We then wrote a journal entry pretending that we had traveled to these places. In the afternoon we painted pelicans like those that can be seen at the Coorong.

Later in the week we visited the bottom half of Western Australia, watching YouTube videos of The Pinnacles...


Quokkas at Rottnest Island...


Monkey Mia...


and Turquoise Bay...



We also watched a flickr slideshow of Western Australian Wildflowers.

Students then made postcards about these places and painted the pictures with watercolour paints. We put envelopes into our journals to store the postcards (in the style of The Jolly Postman book which we read recently in class).

We also found an online Geography flash game to use for practising locating the states. My only gripe with this is that it doesn't include the A.C.T.

During our lesson in the computer lab we used Google Earth to zoom in on places in South Australia and Western Australia. Students were quite excited to be finding the places that we had been 'visiting'.