6B

Welcome to 6B and 2023! We are incredibly excited for what this new year may entail and hope to make the most of the final year in primary school. Collaboration, deepening connections, and developing a positive classroom learning community have been the core foci for Level Six and the whole school in the first week back from holidays.

Through hands-on learning experiences with rich connections to the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) Inquiry process, students have had numerous opportunities to collaborate with the peers in their class. Furthermore, students were challenged to complete Lego sets without the instructions, relying only on their communication and collaboration skills. We then strategically utilised video recordings of the collaboration process as a tool for reflection.

Please view the images below, where students collaborated to design and test Rube Goldberg machines using only resources available in the classroom.

In Inquiry, we have conducted preliminary investigations into the Term One Inquiry question, ‘How does where I live impact me?’ Students have started to explore how geography and location can influence the lives of people across the globe, making further connections to Global Goal 3: Good health and wellbeing.

In English, we started delving into our unit on biographical writing, by exploring biographies that cover famous subjects who have made significant contributions to society. During the unit, we will focus on key skills such as researching, identifying main ideas, and paraphrasing information into one’s own ideas.

In Mathematics, we have incorporated aspects of collaboration, where students in small groups, had to plan and solve open-ended challenge questions in the vein of a Fermi Problem. For example, ‘How many blades of grass are there on the GWPS oval?’ and ‘How many pieces of tanbark are in the ELC playground?’ As an open-ended challenge, the focus was on strategy and how the four mathematical proficiencies of Problem Solving, Understanding, Reasoning and Fluency could be utilised