It has been a busy start to term 4 in the 5/6 Neighbourhood! Intensive swimming is underway and project groups have been involved in various incursions and excursions as we think about being producers and sharing our learning at the Expo later this term. We have also begun looking towards the future, with Grade 5 students tapping into their leadership skills and traits and the Grade 6s beginning to think about their graduation.
PHPS News
We are continuing to produce episodes and apply feedback around the technical details of our News show. In thinking about the ‘legacy’ component of our inquiry, we are focusing on the question of ‘How do we make PHPS News a sustainable endeavour that can be continued by future 5/6 students?’. This is requiring consideration of ways to streamline and document our processes and make them clear for an outsider coming in.
Public Art- Mosaic Friendship Bench
On Tuesday, the students participated in a mosaic incursion, where they learned the necessary skills to execute their planned design of the friendship bench. Our next steps are to apply these new skills to co-creating a bench that can act as an enduring contribution to the school.
What is Forever?
The Forever group visited the Melbourne Museum on Tuesday. We first saw an iMax documentary about the James Webb Space Telescope, which deepened the understanding of scale, magnitude and time – all central concepts in our project.
‘It made me really think about the way that time is subjective’ – Sotir
Next, we visited the T-Rex, 600 Million Years and Triceratops exhibitions. In this time, our focus was not only on the content and specific knowledge being acquired, but also on the way that exhibits are constructed through the synthesis of primary source material, text labels, graphic elements and the layout of a physical space. This is something our group will consider in producing an exhibition of our different explorations and research at the Expo.
Home group and small group targets: Next Steps
English: Spelling will continue to be a focus with daily tasks to support the transference of knowledge to unknown words. We are also exploring common root/base words and their morphology. Mathematics: In mathematics, we are starting to work on financial mathematics and tie this in with an economic focus later in term 4. Whole group targets have focused on probability and chance and we will be turning our focus to angles and geometry in coming weeks.