Yr6 Weekly Update – 21/10/16
I hope you all had a restful and relaxing holiday!
We are right back into the swing of things here in Y6 this week.
We started our week off by completing our summative task for our first unit. In groups of 2-4 the students were creating a governing system for the 2016/17 KJS Student Council.
The students decided how their governing system would work by discussing the system’s features such as representation, decision making, and succession.
Next, they recorded the levels of responsibility within their governing system, including leadership and student responsibilities.
Finally, they demonstrated the positive and negative impacts of their governing system.
We will then vote on them as a class and then the winning governing system from each class will be presented to the Principal. This is such an authentic way for students to use their learning and apply it to a real life context.
On Wednesday we had our student and parent meetings for Y6 camp. We can feel the excitement building! Thank you to all of the parents who came out for the camp information meeting. An email has been sent home with a list of items the students need to bring with them to camp. It is really important that students who have not slept away from home, try to schedule a sleepover at a friend of families house over the next couple of weeks. Students will be participating in hiking, a high elements climbing course, abseiling, kayaking, and a star challenge at the end of the week. We will be reinforcing the idea of personal responsibility.
For literacy, we have been focusing on our “inner voice.” Currently we are focusing on noticing when you lose your way when you are reading. Even good readers can lose track of their ideas in a text or stray from their inner conversation when the text is too hard. By having students realize they have strayed from the text or area distracted we can teach them strategies on how to refocus and get back on track with reading.
For math we have continued to work with decimals and are now going to start using efficient mental and written strategies to add, subtract, multiply and divide by decimals. We will also be starting to think about multiplicative thinking. Multiplicative thinking is indicated by a capacity to work flexibly with the concepts, strategies and representations of multiplication (and division) as they occur in a wide range of contexts.
Next week, we will start our new unit, which falls under the transdisciplinary theme of How the World Works.
Our Central Idea is Current and emerging communications technology impacts society
We will be inquiring into…
- Current and emerging communications technology
- Societal changes as a result of communications technology
- The impacts of communications technology on society
During the unit, students will be looking at the skill of collecting data and will be expected to find information from 1st and 2nd hand sources, use ICT to gather information from a variety of sources and gather facts as well as data as part of their research. Students will also be learning about the thinking skill of synthesizing the data they have researched.
