News from Yr 4/5/6

National Young Leaders Conference

Our Year 5/6 leaders were lucky enough to embark on a journey to the Melbourne Convention Centre on the 23rd of March. This was for the National Young Leaders Day. This day forms part of our leadership program for our senior students who hold a leadership role. Our students were joined by other student leaders from schools across Victoria. The students had the opportunity to listen to other leaders and their individual journey to success including any hardships they may have faced along the way. The speakers included Lachie Smart for example who is the youngest person to fly solo around the world. These speakers hoped to inspire and motivate every young leader to be the best leader they can be by providing tips they learnt on their journey. 

Our 5/6 leaders were very engaged and learnt a lot from the day as well as having fun learning about how leaders in other schools are coming up with ideas to leave a positive impact on their community. 

Religious Education

The Year 4/5/6 students have been learning to deepen their knowledge of the bible through taking part in Contemplative Meditation of the Sunday Gospel. Contemplative Meditation is where the students listen to a bible story twice. On the second reading, they are guided to think about one of the characters in the story, imagining how they were feeling during the story and putting themselves in this character's shoes. Asking themselves the following questions: What was life like back in that time? What clothes were they wearing? Was it really hot and humid or cold and rainy in the story? How might a bystander feel when Jesus performed a miracle right in front of their eyes? 

The students are also asked to reflect on how they are feeling or what they have learnt from this story looking at it from in another person's perspective. 

Writing

The 4/5/6 students have started to harness their skills of persuasion and are learning how to further these skills through their persuasive writing unit. We have started this unit by listening to a story called “I wanna Iguana” by Karen Kaufman Orloff and identifying the main techniques used in this book on how the little boy tried to persuade his mum to get an Iguana  After seeing these techniques used, the students are now creating a letter to persuade the reader to buy something for them whether that be an animal or the latest video game.

As we come towards the end of Lent, the students has been focusing on the Stations of the Cross. We had a look at what the scripture says about these stories and we thought about how we would feel if we were one of the characters in the story. If we were Jesus, how would he have felt having to carry the cross for that long distance? How may Jesus' followers felt seeing Jesus in pain? This type of prayer is contemplative meditation which we have been practising in class this term. After learning about what had happened and how the characters felt in the story, we have been acting out the Stations of the Cross for the Easter play.

Mathematics

Towards the end of the Term, we began our topic of Chance in Mathematics. In this topic, we have been learning about chance experiments. The first experiment we tried as a class was flipping two coins. We investigated the outcomes of this experiment including Heads & Heads, Tails & Tails, and Heads and Tails. The students created data by flipping the coins a certain amount of times and recording these results as a tally. 

We then talked about which outcomes were more likely to occur in each group. As a class, we worked out that all 3 outcomes were equally as likely to happen.

Kind Regards

Mr Jack Cirillo

Year 4/5/6 Classroom Teacher