5/6 Mainstream
Welcome Back!
We hope that everyone had a restful holiday and enjoyed hearing what everyone got up to over the break! Students have come back to school excited for the final term of 2025 and ready to tackle Graduation and Leadership opportunities.
Grade 6 2025
Graduation
As a part of graduation, we are asking all current grade 6 students if they could provide a photo of themselves in Prep. Could you email a digital copy or send in a hard copy to your class teacher. Any hard copies received will be returned after scanning.
More information about graduation to follow.
Grade 6 2026
Hoodies/T-shirts
Last Term, grade 5 students had the opportunity to submit designs for the 2026 Grade 6 T-shirt and Hoodie. We were incredibly impressed with the ideas we were presented with and worked with students to compile the designs and create something they felt represented them as a cohort. The results are really special, and we hope the students will feel very proud wearing these next year!
Ordering is now available via compass and will close on Monday 20th October.
Learning this term
Reading:
This term we will continue our work with Literature Circles. Students will select new novels to read. In small groups they will discuss and unpack text as they read. Students will be practicing and refining skills such as inferring, questioning, summarising and synthesising to build comprehension of texts.
Writing:
We are starting out with an exciting unit on Poetry this term. Students will be introduced to ways that they can construct poetry, beginning to explore rhythm & meter, line breaks and rhyming schemes. We will take inspiration from Slam Poetry performances and encourage students to view this form of writing and speaking as a way to communicate thoughts, feelings and ideas they are passionate about.
Maths:
We have begun this term looking at money and financial maths. Students will create budgets, calculate profit, loss and percentage using money. They will then look at statistics, and in particular data representation and interpretation. We will investigate different types of graphs and when they can be best utilised. We will investigate Location and mapping, learning about grid referencing systems and cartesian coordinates. Throughout the term we will review number and operations work looking at continually building number sense and fluency.
Unit Focus
Students will learn about game design and work in groups to ask, research, imagine, plan, create, test and improve an arcade game. In collaboration with STEM, students will use their knowledge of programming and build an understanding of engineering to create something playable.
Game Worlds:
Yesterday the Grade 5/6 students went to the Game Worlds exhibition at ACMI. Game Worlds features more than 30 videogames from the 1970s to today, with 44 playable moments, original builds, rare design materials and hands-on prototypes that can’t be found anywhere else. Students were full of excitement on the train ride in. A whole exhibition dedicated to gaming was a highly anticipated event! When we arrived at Fed Square, we sat under a tree and ate some food before the first group made their way into the exhibition. As we went down the stairs the lights dimmed and we marvelled at the brightly light entrance. We were each given a little disk that we could tap on displays to download information about the games and save things we were playing or making inside. We had an hour to explore and most of us wished we could have stayed all day! Inside we found games ranging from Celeste to Hollow Night: Silk Song to Neopets mini games to Team Fortress. There was the coolest display of a game of Doom embedded in a lego cube! The code on it is so small it barely needs any RAM to run, we had to look at it through a magnifying glass. Another incredible thing we found was a game of Minecraft that you could play with your eyes! It used eye tracking technology to move the game. There was also a digital game table where you could play Dungeons and Dragons. Overall, we loved getting to see, play and learn about so many different types of games, different game designs and how things have changed so much over time!
Tom says, “The eye Minecraft was fun because I’ve never seen anything like that before”
Esther says, “I liked playing the Push Me, Pull Me game because it was kinda weird but very fun.”
Marley W says, “I really liked creating my own PC because it was really fin and it was a good experience.”
Mable says, “It was really cool to have video games from a long time ago up until now.”
Felix PL says, “PLaying the video game version of DND was really fun because it was not exactly like the DND I normally play so it was a new experience.”
Forest says, “I liked seeing the DOOM on the lego because I’ve never seen a game powered by something so small!”