Primary Life
Year 4 Art Excursion
Eleanor Roberts - Visual Arts Specialist
Year 4 students and staff were delighted to visit and explore Heide Art Museum and Sculpture Park on Tuesday. There we engaged with a huge variety of art and sculptures situated in the park.
Tour guides taught us about how to seek and find answers to our questions about the who, the how and the why. We learned about materials and techniques for creating sculpture, focusing on the three C’s; Casting, Carving and Construction.
Students participated in a soap carving workshop, which challenged them to create through reduction, very different to the more familiar additive process for making sculpture.
A favourite highlight for many was a walk through the Brendan Huntley gallery, where students were allowed to walk barefoot on the art! The colourful whimsical designs on the carpets appealed to young imaginations as well as to their senses.
The rain held off, the grounds were lovely and overall it was a fun day for everyone and a great excursion for our active, inquisitive Year 4 cohort!
Year 5 Melbourne Chinese Excursion
Yan Wu - Chinese Specialist
Our Year 5 students went to Melbourne Chinese Museum in Week 8. In this excursion, students learnt about the history of early Chinese migrants in Australia, including the challenges that early Chinese arrivals faced on their trip to Australia and life on the goldfields in the 1850s.
In the ‘Dragon Gallery’, students learnt about Chinese mythology and symbolism. Students engaged in a focused tour of the Han Dynasty: Life Everlasting Exhibition and participated in an interactive workshop exploring the legacy, key inventions and innovations of the Han period to understand history through artefacts and objects.
Zane from 5JA reflects:
“My favourite part of the day was when I went inside the ship and felt the wobble, and I also liked the Dai Long creature. I learnt that gunpowder was accidentally invented because an emperor wanted to become immortal, but he actually died because he drank mercury. He had terracotta soldiers in his tomb.”
Primary Writing Workshops
Ali Coffey - Head of Curriculum
How powerful are stories?
Our memories, the stories we pay to watch in cinemas and long to be part of, and the ideas that shape what we want life to be like; stories have a big influence in our lives. In a world of competing stories, living out of God’s story is vital for shaping our imagination and directing how we live.
In our Creative Writing Wonder Workshops, with a group of Years 3 to 6 students, we have been exploring exactly that. With inspiration and insight from visiting poet Cam Semmens, we experimented with different forms of poetry - such as Vignettes, Six Word Memoirs, and Tableaus - to uncover the topic of “story”.
Read and reflect on these wonderful pieces of work from our Senior Primary Wonder Workshoppers.
