Thinking Hats

You need to use the 'Thinking Hat' concept to evaluate your Quilt Book. Here is a guide to what the hats mean. Some of the questions are about the quilt making process. Some of them need to be adapted or thought about so that you can make them relevant.

Hat	Explanation	De Bono says to think of…	Key Questions
White Hat	·         focuses directly on the available information ·         facts ·         neutral information  ·         NOT argument or making suggestions	Blank paper Computer printout	1. What information do we have? 2. What information is missing? 3. How do we get the information we need? eg How do we find the area of the material?
Red hat	·         emotions ·         feeling ·         hunches  ·         intuition  ·         likes and dislikes	Fire and warmth	1.  What do you like about the idea? 2.  How do you feel about this? 3.  What don’t you like about this?
Black Hat	·         most used of all the hats  ·         concerned with truth and reality  ·         hat of critical thinking ·         prevents us from making mistakes	Stern judge	1.  Will it work? 2.  Does it fit? 3.  What are the dangers and the problems of sewing and measuring and calculating?
Yellow Hat	·         benefits of an idea ·         yellow hat is full of hope- logical hat so the reason behind the hope must be given ·         seeks to find and show the benefits	Sunshine and optimism	1.  What are the benefits? ie What do we hope to learn from this? 2.  Why should it work?
Green Hat	·         ‘active’ hat ·         used for creative thinking  ·         concerned with proposals, suggestions, new ideas, new alternatives, new solutions and inventions  ·         emphasis is on ‘newness’	Grass, trees, vegetation and growth	Key questions should focus on: 1.  Exploration of the ideas 2.  Proposals and suggestions 3.  Alternatives 4.  New ideas 5.  Provocations eg What was my design? How did I make it different to other people's ideas?
Blue Hat	·         overview  ·         the process control ·         above the thinking’ looking down on the thinking  ·         thinking about thinking!	Blue Sky (above everything) Conductor of an orchestra	What sort of thinking is needed? ie How do we solve our problems? Where are we now? What is the next step? Where have we been?

Science Week

Do you know

What is today

Yes today

Is Science Day

Shout Hooray

All the way

Because today

Is Science Day!

Actually, it's not just Science Day, it's Science Week! 400% better than Science Day (if my maths is correct). We have a lot of activities planned for this week, beginning of course with Empty Parking Lot day. How many people car-pooled or travelled by public transport today? I know I did, if you count coming to school with Mrs Ward and the Junior Wards as car-pooling.

To be honest, I'm not sure that using one of these

is better than coming by car but the idea that we should be more aware of the resources we're using is a good one.

Later in the week we're having Nature's Breeze Day, which I know we're all looking forward to, and My Hump, My Provision when everyone has to bring their own water to school.

Whatever our activity at school, let's remember; we've only got one world, let's look after it!

A Book Is For Life...

We're thinking a lot about helping other people at the moment. Some of us have become very energised by thoughts of people in trouble around the world and how we need to help them. One difficulty is trying to find a way that we can make a difference when we are far away. Here's an example;

There are many kids around the world who cannot afford the things that we take for granted, like books. We may have many books that we don't even read any more while other kids have never had one of their own. One major publishing company has promised to donate one free book every time someone reads a book on their website. No money, no buying anything, just reading.

So here is something quite easy that we can do to help others. It's a simple action and all we need to do is give a little bit of time. Time is something that we have a lot of but we don't always like to share it with other people. If you click on this link and read a book and enter your email address, five minutes of your time could make a big difference to kids around the world.

Candy & Soda Doesn't Mix!

We're looking at reversible and irreversible changes in Science at the moment. We're trying to find out why some changes are reversible and one of the ideas that we came up with is that they involve chemical changes. Here's a chemical change in action but remember, don't try this at home!


Here is a good, but complicated, explanation of what we have been studying.

If you click here, you will be taken straight to a section explaining how gases dissolve.

Think Before You Leap!

So, did anyone notice anything strange about yesterday?

Kensuke's Kingdom - Where In The World?

Here's the list of places that the Peggy Sue called at on her journey:

• Southampton
• English Channel
• Bay of Biscay
• Coruna, Spain
• Azores
• Canary Islands
• Cape Verde Islands
• Recife, Brazil
• Rio, Brazil
• St. Helena
• Cape Town, South Africa
• Indian Ocean
• Perth, Australia
• Sydney
• Great Barrier Reef
• Coral Sea
• Papua New Guinea

Remember, some of them are islands and some are the mainland. Remember what we talked about this morning regarding the distance from shore that the boat would sail.

The green names are the places they went through, the others are places where they stopped.

Michael fell off the boat before they got to their destination so the line should not continue all the way to the end of the journey. Use a dotted line for the journey after Michael fell overboard.

Mental Health Break

Our beautiful world, if we take the time to look around us.

100 Days of School

We recently celebrated our 100 days of school here at CIS with a day of activities centred around 100. We had lots of different things going on in the different grade teams and in Eagles we spent some of our time on construction. Here you can see some of the groups trying to make a bridge with a span of 100cm.


They were allowed to use 100 straws, 100 lolly sticks, 100cm of tape and 100cm of string. It was a lot harder than it seemed at first.


There were lots of different designs but in the end most groups settled on something similar.


They had to put an increasing amount of weight on the bridge to see how much it could hold.