Year 5 News

The days are getting quicker and quicker, with only a handful of weeks left in Year 5! We have had a busy few weeks with some of the highlights being the BNPS Colour Run, Year 5 excursion to Melbourne Museum and some science lessons with Mrs Graham, examining creatures and their adaptations under the microscopes and exploring magnetic forces.

Melbourne Museum Excursion

Last week the Year 5s were fortunate enough to attend Melbourne Museum's 'Climate Change and Victoria’s Future' program. The classes were split into doubles to enable us to take full advantage of the museum's offerings.

Half the day consisted of the students roaming four different exhibitions which included 600 Million Years Ago, Dinosaur Walk, Forest Gallery and Dynamic Earth. There were lots of oohs, ahhs and eeks as we saw bugs, insects and spiders up close and came face to face with some skinks and bower birds in the forest gallery.

The second half of the day was spent exploring the different solutions, both short and long term, to help reduce climate change and its impacts. The teachers were extremely proud of how the students conducted themselves, representing BNPS. We would like to thank Lily Diggins and Mr Taylor for accompanying us, without them the excursion would not have been able to go ahead.

Please enjoy some recounts from the students:

On Monday, the 7 November, students in 5B and 5D arrived at school at 8:30am for bus departure at 9:00 to the Melbourne Museum. We got on the bus, and the journey from wood street to the museum took around 45 minutes. When we arrived, we ate our snack and left our bags on a trolley before departing with 5D and

entering the Learning Lab, for a lesson on climate change, what it causes and what we, as young students, can do to help. Some examples of problems are: overproducing waste, deforestation and overhunting endangered species, which leads to ecosystem unbalance.

After we finished our session with Julia in the Learning Lab, we reunited with 5D and had a lunch break. Then, we went to the 600 million years ago exhibition, which explored how earth has changed over time. Then we moved onto a section called dynamic earth to cover gemstones, rocks, minerals and how they are formed. After that we explored bugs alive to look at bugs and their weird, quirky features and adaptations.

When we finished bugs alive we entered the outdoors to overview lizards, birds and bugs that live in a rainforest biome. We read about their different adaptations to find out how they survive in those environments.

Soon enough we were in the foyer awaiting 5D’s arrival while watching a short video on a beached whale that had its bones removed for display at the Melbourne museum in 1992 and is still there today.

After a short amount of time we were all counted onto the bus for school arrival just before pick up.

Georgia

Year 5s unit of inquiry is “significant events affect the balance of an ecosystem”

So last week on Monday 5D and 5B had an excursion to Melbourne Museum, I was really excited because I love the Museum. The bus was really loud because the boys at the back were singing songs and just shouting in general.

When we got to the museum, I saw a lot of different schools coming off of different buses. Before we went inside we were asked to eat a quick snack before we went inside. When we asked to go inside we put our backpacks on a trolley to store them while we roamed the museum.

My class (5D) were going to 4 different exhibits. The first exhibit we went to were ‘bugs alive’ there were a lot of spiders and cockroaches which terrified me. The second exhibit was looking at stones/ gems from a long long time ago. The third exhibit was looking at dinosaur bones, and how they look 6’000’000 years ago.

Our fourth and final exhibit (which was my favourite) was the forest gallery, as we walked up the path to the first section was walking under the waterfall and looking at fish, after we got out from the waterfall we saw two turtles to look at. But then my favourite moment happened. When we walked through an open area where there were two skinks getting some sun on there back. I was tired so I sat down on a box to have a rest but then I heard a weird screeching sound coming from the bush, and to my surprise it was a bower bird. (A bower bird is a bird which collects blue things to put around its nest to a tracked mates.

Then we did an activity on climate change. We split into groups to come up with ideas on specific subjects to help save climate change.