Year 6 Book Week Reviews

Book Week Reflection

By Christine

On Monday the 21st of August 2023 we celebrated fantastic books. Every single person in school dressed up as their favourite character and looked fabulous!! Each year’s costumes get better and better. The classes had been separated and paired with different kids from Years Prep to Six to help out with some younger children and to embrace relationships from older and younger kids. Luckily, in my group I had my buddy Aria and my friend Ethan with some other kids.

Our first rotation was a scavenger hunt of Where’s Wally around the school with some questions to be answered on a sheet of paper. This was with Ms V and Ms B. It was an enjoyable experience especially when you test your brain with books and movie references. There was about 25 questions to be answered, some from Dr. Suess, Harry Potter and others. Surprisingly, most people couldn’t find questions 3 and 5 until the rotation had ended! This first rotation came out to be enjoyable and fun.

The second rotation was making a frog toy. The activity was set in Prep B’s classroom with Mr. Butler. It started off with watching a video of a book called SNAP! After the video we were instructed to make frogs with our buddies if they were in our group. The frog had a fun part to it, a game was created by attaching a bead (as the fly) to a string (as the tongue). Once finished we played with it, you had to catch the string and bead in the mouth.

The third rotation was taking photos of nature such as bugs, plants or tree saplings on the floor. This activity was in Ms. W’s classroom Year 1.

We started off with reading a book called Naturopolis about nature that you can find anywhere outside. Once finished we brought an ipad and a piece of paper with us outside. We took pictures of plants on walls, insects, tree bark and leaves that were then ticked off on the paper.

The fourth rotation was based on the book ‘Frank’s Red Hat’. We could either do word searches or make a hat out of cardboard or paper recycling with Ms. Daws in Year 2D. I created an odd looking cardboard hat with sticky tape!

The second last activity was a book/movie quiz with Miss Jackson with Years 3 to 6. It was very competitive, each house colour (Red, Yellow, Green) was competing against each other to get first place by answering all the questions related. It was EXTREMELY, INCREDIBLY fun and competitive!

The very last activity of the day was going to the Malvern library to read a book with a librarian. The book she read was called ‘The book with no pictures’. It may not have had any pictures but it was funny with the silly words.

All in all, it was a great Book Week!!

BOOK WEEK

By Luca P

On Monday the 21st of August we had Book Week. Book Week is a week where we do book activities. There is one day of the week where we dress up as a book character like Humpty Dumpty or Harry Potter and stuff like that. On Monday there were great costumes, the school and I were blown away by some of the eye-catching costumes. I came as Mario and my friend Alex came as Luigi. We loved our costumes. They were awesome but maybe not as good as some of the others. On the day of the dress ups we also do activities throughout the day and I will share some activities that we did.

My group had the where’s wally activity first, we had to walk around the school yard to find wally and his questions. His questions were about things that happened in books or what the characters were wearing. Some of the questions went like What school house was Harry Potter in at Hogwarts? Who is Pug’s best friend that appears in each book? From Pig the Pug. There were a total of 25 questions you had to answer as well as find them around the garden (they were hard to find) well some were.

Next we went to the Year 3 room to read an award winning book called Frank’s Red Hat. The book was very interesting as it was short and sharp and had a great storyline as the book went like this. Frank the Penguin had courageous ideas about making things and gadgets, one day he thought of making a red hat, mind you the whole world around him was black and white with a sad theme or just no sense of colour, he then showed his friends his hat and they didn’t like it and one of his friends got eaten whole by a whale that saw the hat on his head… He then went back to the thinking board and thought that maybe he chose the wrong colour or the wrong shape, but some of his other friends liked the idea and he made more and he also made a scarf, the story shows to not give up and maybe think of other things to add to it. We then made our own ideas and put them on the penguin such as belts, scarfs, beanies and all sorts.

We then had lunch and Luigi and I ran around in our costumes playing soccer along with our mates and their costumes.

After lunch my group went to the Year 4 Classroom where we listened to a story about the journey of a frog and then made our own frog. We started with the body pre made and then we had to add the legs and arms with pieces of paper. We then made a tongue with some string. We also attached a bead at the end of the string representing a bug, it was also a game as you had to try to get the bug in the throat of the frog. We then had a competition where you had to try and get the bug in the throat the fastest.

Next we went into the Year 5 room were we learnt about the nature around us and how it can grow up trees along footpaths and all kind of things. We then headed outside to take pictures of the nature that we could find which was like a bird perching in a tree, natural rain water and lots of other grass related things.

After lunch we had a quiz with the senior students going in teams of their house colours which were Yellow, Red and Green. My team (Yellow) won, we had to send up one student from each class and they had to guess the hard questions that Ms Jackson read out. Some questions were really hard. You don’t need to know this but I didn't know any but that’s okay as I showed great support for my team.

Following that we went to the Library for a browse around and we also read a book called the Book With No Pictures, the book was loaded with weird words. After that the day had quickly ended and we went home.

In conclusion I loved my last book week. In my opinion it was the best one throughout my years at St Joseph's and the costumes were just next level. Everyone tried so hard to make a great costume and that hard work paid off.

Book Week

By Tom N

On Monday the 21st of August we had Book Week. What happens is everyone gets to dress up as their favourite character from a book. And at the start of the day all the classes and the teachers did a catwalk showing off their exquisite costumes. It was so fun, then for the rest of the day we split up into different groups and did four different activities. After that we did a stimulating quiz about different books and series. This one came down to the wire with Yellow and Red tying on 9 points So it went to sudden death with Yellow taking out the close win. After that we took a pleasant walk down to the Malvern library where we listened to a story and got to browse for books.

The first activity of the day was with Mr. Cleary. We did a scavenger hunt but before that we listened to a book called Naturopolis. It was a very cool story about an ant that travelled through the city and saw lots of nature until he finally got to the forest. After that we went outside and got a list of things from nature and had to find them all. We got paired up with the younger students and had lots of fun but I didn’t get to finish.

This led to our second activity which was outside as well and we had to look for these Where’s Wally posters and answer the questions. We had about 30 minutes to answer all twenty-five questions, they were all hidden around the yard and some were really hard to find. My group came three questions short of the twenty-five.

After lunch we had two last activities And the second last one was about a book called Frank’s Red Hat. We read the book and it was about a penguin called Frank who was an inventor but there was always something wrong with his inventions. Then one day he made a bright red hat. All the penguins thought the hat was going to hurt them or do something to them, but Frank insisted and gave the hat to his friend Neville. Then as Neville took the hat a giant Killer Whale jumped out of the water and ate him. All the penguins then fled to a faraway place but Frank kept making his hats then he saw all the seals were wearing the hats and they loved them. For the activity we got to cut out paper and make hat to wear.

Year 6 Science Week Reviews

SCIENCE WEEK

BY:ALDRICH 2023

EARTHQUAKE BUILDINGS

This year's science week was remarkable! Our first activity was in our class. We made a building that can survive massive earthquakes. We built our buildings with toothpicks and marshmallows. The most efficient structure to survive earthquakes was the triangle shaped building. We also learned different ways to make the buildings withstand the earthquakes, we learned how engineers use things like braces, floating feet and supporting the joints.

JACKETS

Our next activity was in Year three. The task was to pick someone and we picked Gabriele and we needed to make them a jacket out of big pieces of paper. My group and I successfully made a jacket out of paper. Gabriele tried it on and it fitted. But there was a challenge: the person that was wearing the jacket needed to lift their hands. Luckily ours didn't rip. After that the contestants needed to do a catwalk and it was hilarious!

PARACHUTES

Our last activity was in the year five room. We made a parachute out of very thin paper. Me and my group made a three layered parachute. It was time to test it. First we added 100g of weight into our parachute and we dropped it off the bridge in the playground. Luckily our parachute survived and for the final test we added an egg to our parachute. We dropped it out of the window on the second floor of the building. Some people added tape to their cups so the egg didn't fall out but we didn't know that we could do that so we just dropped our parachute with an egg. Luckily our egg didn't fall out and it survived but our parachute took a serious amount of damage. But, there’s nothing that tape can’t fix!

Science Week

By Tom H

Starting on the 14th of August we had science week, a week where every afternoon we would have a fun packed activity with different ones every day. Ranging from making a jacket out of paper, to making a parachute! It was really fun and I am going to be reviewing every activity including my favourite one’s (there was 4 activities in total).

The first one we did was the one in our own classroom, which was making an earthquake proof building. We watched a video about how engineers make real life buildings earthquake proof. There was a few methods to make it more resistance, and I already had a set few in mind. I got in a group with Hamish and Daniel and together we thought of some really good ways to implement these methods, including one of our own ideas. Once we had finished constructing our building it was time for the first test, the table rumble. We started shaking the table and it didn’t put a dent in our building. It was looking good but I decided to add one more thing and then came the final test, The Jelly Test! We put our building on the jelly, and, it didn’t do anything our one survived the best and could even survive being thrown into the air.

The next activity we did was making a jacket out of just paper, masking tape and scissors, really limiting our materials. But all of the people did pretty well making there own jacket and we showed off our jackets and how they were made.

The next one we did was a much more peaceful and simple activity, a marble maze. We all had a paper plate and couloured the background and started gluing in cut up straws to make our maze. We then all got a marble and tried everybody’s maze. My favourite one was Joe’s because he got really creative and made a pinball machine!

Last but definitely not least, was make your own parachute. Now obviously,we weren’t testing it on ourselves, but we tested it on 100g weights and later and egg. We first had to design our parachute. Our group used crepe paper and some thick paper. We made sure it covered a lot of surface area to get the most air resistance possible. We then had our first test, 100g off about a 3m drop. Our’s survived that pretty easily. The final test was an egg of a two story window. It was hard to fit through because the window didn’t open that much, but were able to get it through. We dropped it and it had a smooth ride down, but unfortunately it hit a wall on the way down cracking our egg.

Science week was definitely one of my favorite times of the year and I hope the activities stay this fun in other years.

Pre-Prep in Terms 3 & 4