A Big Week for Stage 3 Fuji Apples

This past fortnight in Stage 3 Fuji Apples, the students have greatly enjoyed exploring both Science Week and Book Week, with all our learning themed around these wonderful annual events.

Science Week

In Science Week, the students were tasked with choosing a scientific area of study that fascinated them to explore further in a one week Genius Hour project. Students chose from all fields of scientific study including astronomy, meteorology, geology, biology, palaeontology, chemistry, physics, ecology, engineering, oceanography and botany.

The students presented their research in the presentation style of their choice including PowerPoints, instructional videos, websites, models, songs and lap books. We then utilised ZOOM and the Stream on Google Classroom to share our presentations and discuss our findings.

It was wonderful to see how engaged the students were in this task, undertaking experiments and building detailed models. We had experiments that created rainbows, coding demonstrations, models of DNA made out of gummy bears and Lego cruise ships and engines that could move using electrical circuits.

The week was a great success, with the students loving the opportunity to share their passion projects with each other and receive feedback from not only their teachers, but also their peers.

Book Week

In Book Week, the students have continued to celebrate each other’s work, reading and reviewing each other’s Historical Fiction Picture Books and Audiobook recordings.

These picture books are the culmination of three weeks of English creative writing and Visual Arts illustrating, inspired by the most famous battles fought by Australian troops in the First World War. The students were tasked with writing and illustrating their Historical Fiction based on the research they undertook about the battle and use a collection of writing styles to convey the story to their readers.

Students utilised poetry, character description, diary entries and letter writing to represent the events of the battle from various perspectives, considering not only the impact the battle would have on the soldiers, but also the civilians and families back home. Some even chose to incorporate a moral into their story, such as don’t judge a book by its cover and there are consequences for behaving arrogantly towards others.

The students have shared on ZOOM the books they are currently reading at home and have enjoyed recording highlights from these books for others to listen to as audiobooks on the class stream. Some have also chosen to record their historical fiction stories as audiobooks, so their friends can read along with their picture books.

On Wednesday, the class celebrated Book Week by holding our annual Book Parade over ZOOM. The students had the choice to dress up as their favourite character from a book, movie, television show or video game, or to share a book that they love to recommend to the class. We saw Slappy from Goosebumps appear on the ZOOM, as well as other famous characters like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and 11 from Stranger Things. Some chose to dress up as concepts like capitalism and communism, and we even had a Panthers supporter in the mix.

Many great books were also recommended, demonstrating the diverse range of novels the students are reading during lockdown as part of their Reading Contract activities, many engaging with books focused around our English focus of War historical fiction.

From the students of Stage 3 Fuji Apples, Happy Book Week! There truly is nothing better during lockdown then getting lost in a great book.

Mr John Forbes

Stage 3 Teacher

COVID Briefing #5