Classroom News 5/6
Resilience - Perspective in Groups - Creating Stop Motion Videos
By engaging with dedicated lessons and activities, Year 5/6 students have been developing key social and emotional competencies, specifically in the areas of resilience and perspective-taking. Students were learning practical ways to approach disagreements, including active listening, validating feelings, appreciating diverse viewpoints, and using empathetic communication. To solidify this learning, students worked in groups to design characters and scenarios and create their own short stop-motion video. This hands-on project encouraged students to reflect on their own ability to work in groups, consider diverse perspectives, and respond with compassion. All the students were incredibly proud of their filmmaking skills and we might just have some future filmmakers and stop-motion producers among us!
Writing Ballads - Poetry Slam
As part of the English writing curriculum, students are expected to investigate a genre of poetry. Each student wrote a ballad following the ABCB rhyme scheme including 4 line stanzas called quatrains. They were expected to include a chorus and to use a thesaurus to explore the myriad of word choices available to them. The results were outstanding.
The English curriculum also expects students to prepare and deliver a text in front of an audience following the structures of spoken interactions by varying voice, volume, tone, pitch, and pace. Each student presented their ballad in the form of a poetry slam.
Reading ‘The Explorer’ - We Are Illustrators!
Reading in the senior school involves the ability to infer and evaluate text. During our reading sessions of ‘The Explorer’, students were able to analyse the meaning of complex sentences and paragraphs, use evidence from the text to support their beliefs and understandings, and extract key details from the text to visualise the scene and characters.
We have attached the drawings of the main characters (that were created by senior students) where they used information from the text to determine what the character looks like.
Many students also expressed their love of this story via their book reviews which shared their perspective of the book, and the impact it had on them.
At the end of term 3, the Year 5 and 6 students learned about geometry, specifically focusing on angles. They learned how to accurately measure and draw angles using protractors and through hands-on and problem-solving activities, students honed their ability to find missing angles on straight lines, in triangles and around a full rotation.
This term, the students have been focusing on Measurement. They tackled questions related to the concepts of mass, volume, and capacity, developing crucial skills that extend far beyond the classroom. A key focus was on converting between different units (like kilograms to grams, or litres to millilitres), ensuring a solid understanding of how these units relate to each other.
Parliament in the classroom
To culminate a successful term of learning about Civics and Citizenship, the students were engaged in a parliamentary role play to decide on whether the “No Homework “ bill should become a law. Students were given a role to play, a speech to write and they were assigned a members seat (either on the government's side or the opposition). This activity was an excellent ‘hands on’ learning experience where they gained a deeper understanding of how Parliament and the Law work.
Science - Light Luminates Life
This term’s Inquiry invites the students to research and learn about the properties of light. This week’s topic focused heavily on reflections and the students explored specular reflections, incident rays, reflective rays and diffuse reflections. Attached are photos of their experiments where they cleverly reflected torch light through a maze to hit a bullseye.
