Prep | Year 6 News

Central idea: Ideological thinking pervades decision making within societies
Concepts: Function, Perspective, Responsibility

Unit Of Inquiry

Organising a country is no easy task. After our trip to Canberra we have been diving into the world of government systems. We have asked ourselves what the best way to run a country is? Mrs Nel showed us the strengths (and scariness) of being under her Dictatorship. Queen Janes gave us more of a say but also banished people from her Monarchy whenever she felt like it. Mr Gannon of the Sharks Party had a victory over Mrs Hollamby’s Fun Police Party (although nothing actually got done). Communism under Mr Short was extremely fair… but also, not very fair.

This week we are learning more about our own personal ideologies and values. What would we do if we held positions of power?

Given the craziness of the election, we have tentatively booked an independent member for Banks to come and talk about his experiences in politics.

Our assessment for this unit will involve creating a system of government for a new country and thinking about how we would create an effective system of governance.

Monarchy by Adriano 6M

Next in UOI

Our next Unit of Inquiry is Sharing the Planet. We will inquire into rights and responsibilities of humans in the struggle to share finite resources with other people. We will also study access to equal opportunities; peace and conflict resolution. If you have any expertise or personal stories about immigration or refugees please let the Year 6 teachers know.

English

For the first two weeks of term we have focussed on writing informative texts. We wrote about different Prime Ministers of Australia in a formal and structured information report. Note taking and creating paragraphs has been a focus. We have learnt to reference everything in our reports so that we do not plagiarise. Mrs Nel showed us why Wikipedia is not always reliable by changing some information so that it was false.

We still enjoy rapid writing for 10 minutes every day and we have progressed to include a grammar focus while we write. Last week we discussed verbs and this week we have been reflecting on adverbs.

In literacy groups, we have continued to read and study different novels. Our teachers have taught us to infer what the author is describing by using clues and prior knowledge. We look forward to starting new books next week.

Next in English

Creative writing

Comprehension Strategies (Character and setting, prediction)

Grammar (verbs, adverbs, adjectives, simple, compound and complex sentences)

Maths

We have just finished a unit on chance and probability. We had a variety of lessons in which we explored the some of the language involved with chance. Expected frequency versus observed frequency are two of the mathematical terms that we learnt about. We really enjoyed creating our own chance experiments and predicting the outcomes.

Using fractions, decimals and percentages is a big part of understanding the chance of events occurring. We will explore fractions in more detail later in the year.

Coming Up in Maths

Multiplication and division

Mass

Time

Position

Christian Studies

This term in Christian Studies, the boys are engaging with a research game called 33 A.D – the life of Jesus. Over the next few weeks, the boys will work in groups to research chosen miracles, parable and people and places. During their time at Trinity, they have investigated many stories from the Bible. This term allows them to consolidate on their knowledge and to investigate deeper into the events they already know. At the conclusion of the term, they will present their findings to the class. In Chapel, we will be continuing to think about Covenants and how they were fulfilled in the person of Jesus.

Mandarin

This term Year 6 students continue to improve their language skills using Education Perfect as a tool. We focus on student agency in the personalised learning as the assigned tasks put students various needs and levels into consideration.

Students are learning and practising useful skills starting from the vocabulary practice and they are guided to use the vocabulary lists. Then they use the word foundation to recognise key information from written and oral texts, as well as to build on sentences with the attention to the word order and sentence structures.

To encourage students’ learning, we have set up vocabulary competitions for bronze, silver and gold medals and many boys are enjoying this.