Final Exhibition Reflection
We had our exhibition evening on Wednesday, and it was an experience that I will never forget. Having different people visit my stall was quite exhilarating, because some of them told me things that I didn’t know about my topic, which was biodiversity, but I am getting quite ahead of myself. We need to start at the very beginning, when we were just becoming acquainted with the topic of Year 5 Exhibition.
The first stage was tuning in. We learnt all about how to write a central idea, which is the main idea around the inquiry, and we had one for the entire exhibition unit, which was; “We raise awareness by expressing our values.” The central idea for my group, however was “Our advancements impact the natural world,” as David and Daniel, the other people in my group were doing deforestation, we thought that that was the one that best suited all of us. At this stage, we also ha to write our lines of inquiry, which are basically just statements beginning with “an inquiry into…” and those were the things that we decided to research about. Of course, we also had to know what our topic was, so that we could research into it, and my lines of inquiry were “an inquiry into the main factors that affect biodiversity,” “an inquiry into what we can do to help protect biodiversity” and “and inquiry into whether loss of biodiversity is actually a bad thing.”
The next stage was finding out. We had to do all our research, and I found that starting the research was actually harder that when we were in the middle of doing it. I found it hard to stay motivated, as I didn’t have any leads, no specific things to look into. I knew I had my lines of inquiry, but because I had pretty much no prior knowledge about biodiversity. After I had found out what the main causes of loss of biodiversity were, it was much easier to research, because I had main things to look into, and that was when I started to look at my other lines of inquiry.
About 6 weeks s after we began our research, it was time for the sorting out part of the exhibition. In this stage, we had to start sorting out the facts that we had found out, and if we needed to more research on one of our lines of inquiry, then that was the time to do it. For me, I didn’t really have any more things to research about, so I started making my fact sheets. We had to make a fact sheet for every line of inquiry, basically summarising what we had learnt about our topic. For my line of inquiry about the main factors that affect biodiversity, I made several sheets, as instead of making one sheet, I made one saying what they all were, and others, one for each factor, which elaborated on the factor. The other lines of inquiry were much easier to compact into one sheet, so I just made one each for those lines of inquiry.
Once we had sorted out all our research, it was time to make conclusions. The big “so what?” What was the point of doing all this research. This was when we had to have our fact sheets done, so we could display them on the night. This stage was still in therm three, so it didn’t feel that pressing to finish up, except maybe to the people who hadn’t been efficient with their time during the researching. At the end of this stage, we had to start thinking about what our displays would look like. I decided that instead of having my work all over the wall behind me, I would just have the inquiry cycle, and what we did at each stage, with my work in a folder on the table.
The final stage is taking action, where we have to do something to make a change to improve our issue. We haven’t really looked at that yet, but for my taking action I am joining with the group that was looking into GMOs, and we are making a biodiverse, organically grown, green outdoor work area. I will update you more as we continue to work on our action.
Finally, the night came around. This is what my display looked like:
I was asked to do the opening for the night, and I was really nervous, though I tried not to look like it. The feelings of triumph when I taught people new things was one of the best feelings in the world, though if I had the chance to do Year 5 Exhibition again, I probably would have looked into something like self image, because I know that lots of people around the world are not happy with the way that they look.
All in all, exhibition was an amazing experience, one that I will never forget. We haven’t completely finished it though, as we still have to take our action. Thanks for reading about my exhibition experience.
The two men shook hands outside the bank, smiling. “I be incredibly proud of our deal, and I hope thee is too?”, one said.
