Year 6 Spotlight

Leadership Opportunities

The Year 6 cohort are the oldest in the school, so we have to demonstrate to the rest of FPS what it means to be a leader. We encourage younger year levels to make better choices and help kids understand what’s right and wrong.

The Year 6s have been setting good examples to the younger kids in lots of ways to make sure everyone is as happy as they can be at school! Some ways the year sixes help the community are being responsible, standing up for fellow students, looking out for people, and making sure everyone is okay in the yard.

The Year 6s help organise events at school. We help with things like Harmony Day, Neurodiversity Day, assemblies, and many more important things. We talked to some Year 6 students and asked them about their experience with these events.

Harmony Day

• “I thought it helped my independence.” ~ Esther, 6C
• “I got to help the younger students with a special activity me and my friends organised.” ~ Jethro, 6C

Leadership Conference

• “I liked the Leadership meeting because they taught us skills and discipline to help us become the best leaders we can be.” ~ Jun, 6C

Selling ANZAC Badges

• “It was a great opportunity to sell the ANZAC day badges, we are very lucky that we got to do it for the school!” ~ Mon, 6C
• “I think it was a nice thing to sell to the younger year levels. I think it’s good that they can look up to us and think ‘one day I want to do that’. It was great for FPS to contribute to the ANZAC appeal. We raised a lot of money!” ~ George, 6B

Hosting Assemblies

• “It was a great privilege to host an assembly this term. It is important for the Community Leaders to be able to have these opportunities. At first, my stomach was all butterflies. But eventually I started to enjoy myself!” ~Penny, 6C

Art Committee

• “It helped me learn how to “command” people and deal with trouble” ~ Grace, 6B

Student Voice

• “I like that I’m helping to make the school a better place!” ~ Jay, 6C

STEM Committee 

• “I think the STEM committee has done a great job helping Mariah with resources, and everyone enjoys it.” ~ Heather, 6A

We are so proud of all this work we have done for the school, and we hope to continue this for the rest of the year.

~ Written by Billy, Eliza and Alex. M, Year 6 Students

Learning about Australian History

This term we are learning about Australian history, specifically to start with the Federation and when Australia’s six British colonies became one nation. Before the Federation, each colony of Australia had their own laws and rules, we learnt how unfair each colony was because of their amount of resources and wealth compared to other colonies.

Our initial challenge was that we were told to build towers out of MABs, each group had a different advantage or disadvantage, like less or more building materials, less or more time to build, group members unable to speak, only using our non-dominant hand, etc. We then needed to reflect on this.

It was decided that on the next challenge everyone should get the same amount of building blocks and the same amount of time so that it was equal. This replicated how the nation we know today as Australia became one between all the different colonies.

Reflection

Overall, it was a fun experiment that we learned a lot from, it was a great way to learn about the history topic and to get us to think what it felt like to be working under the conditions of a stand-alone colony.

It was extremely difficult to build a tall tower because of all the different variables of the activity. My group had it better than most, mainly for the reason that we got extra blocks for the building. After all the groups went from all having different resources to the exact same materials and in the end, it actually helped my group build a taller tower seeing that we had limited resources. All in all it was such a fun experience and a really good session of inquiry. 

 

~ George, 6B

Key learnings/takeaways

 This activity taught us becoming a federation and one country, where resources and opportunities are more equal allows us as a community to be more successful. 

 

~ Hazel & Lexi, 6B

~ Year 6 Teachers (Gemma, Daniel & Anneliese) and Students