Around the Primary Classes

Young Scientists Visit Year 5

Last week 3 young scientists from the University of Tasmania came to work with Year 5 students.  

One of the scientists, named Laura, was from the school of psychology.  She studied the brain. She was interested in how we look after our brain and help it to work well.

She began with these items and Year 5 needed to guess which one was most like the brain - an egg, a plant, putty or Lego.  

She told us the brain is actually like all of them:

• It is like an egg because our brain is fragile, easily damaged or broken.  We should wear a helmet to protect it.  
• Our brain is like a plant because it needs water and nourishment.   
• The brain is like putty because it is malleable.  It can change its function and connections – this is called neuroplasticity.  
• The brain is like Lego because each time we learn the neurons in our way make connections and when we practise things the connections become stronger.

 Year 5 learned a lot from these passionate scientists.

Year 6

Last Thursday, Year 6 were lucky enough to have a guest artist come into our classroom. 

Local teacher and portrait artist, Hamish Hall, taught us about the importance of portrait drawings, the principals of shading and recognising the key role of values in portraiture. He also taught us the importance of making mistakes and banned the use of rubbers as we learned and played throughout our lesson. 

Over the next three weeks, Mr. Hall will help us to create portraits of key figures from Australian Federation as part of our integrated unit ‘Making of a Nation’. We think the results from our first lesson are already striking and cannot wait to show how our new skills improve as we learn more.