Connecting to our learning

In Room 15 we have been thinking about what makes learning easier. To understand how to make a complex task easier we decided to use our knowledge of success criteria to make something challenging... like balloon dogs!

Mrs Lashlie first let us have a go without any success criteria... Boy was that a laugh, we all tried to blow up the balloons with our mouths but we soon realised that wasn't going to happen!


So Mrs Lashlie blew them up for us using the pump and we had a going at making our dogs by looking at Mrs Lashlie's finished one. We didn't know where to start!

We soon realised the importance of success criteria in completing complex tasks.

So Mrs Lashlie modelled how to make a balloon dog and we worked to co-construct the success criteria for making our balloon dogs. The success criteria we cam up with was:

• Use a pump to blow the balloon up.
• Tie a knot in the end of our balloon, this knot becomes the nose.
• Squeeze the balloon a little way down and twist to make a little head.
• Hold the head and squeeze and twist another section of balloon to make an ear.
• Bend the balloon down so it is the same size as the other ear and squeeze and twist the second ear.
• Hold the ears together and twist at the narrow part to join the ears together securely.
• Squeeze and twist a section for the neck and repeat with two bigger sections, bending the balloon down to make sure they are the same size, to make the front legs.
• Hold the legs and twist at the narrow part to join the two legs together securely.
• Squeeze and twist after a large section to make the body, repeat for the two back legs, ensuring they are roughly the same size as the front legs but remember to leave a little for the tail.
• Hold the legs and twist at the narrow part to join the last two legs together securely.
• The left over balloon makes the tail.
• Tada!

Other things that we found helped us to be successful were:

• Working with a peer.
• Feedback and feedforward.
• Persistance.

With the help of the success criteria was everyone able to be successful? Absolutely!