Yr6 Weekly Update – 28/10/16
How the World Works
Update on our student governing system…
Each class voted on their governing system and the winners were presented to Ms. Thomas. We are now in the process of holding class elections to see who will represent the new student council.
We are diving right into our new unit this week and started off with a tech/no tech learning provocation for the students.
As our Central Idea is Current and emerging communications technology impacts society, each class introduced different learning engagements where one group of students could use technology to find the answers and one group had to use different strategies.
The students did a word study task where half of the class was required to find words in a dictionary and the other half were allowed to use the internet. The math task was to answer a certain amount of questions in a certain amount of time. Some had a paper and pencil to work them out others were given calculators. The final task was research based. Some students were able to use good old Google and some had to actually open a newspaper and read it. We quickly discovered that although computers can be very efficient for some things, they can also be time consuming and distracting. Many students were distracted easily when using technology and they also found that their research gave them so many results they didn’t know where to start.
For literacy this unit we will be focusing on Synthesizing. Synthesizing involves merging new information with existing knowledge to create an original idea, see a new perspective, or form a new line of thinking. To help at home, you can encourage students to interact personally with what they are reading by prompting them to assimilate the words, pictures, and ideas with their own personal thoughts.
For maths we have started to discuss different mental and written strategies to add, subtract, multiply and divide. We have also started 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.
On Friday we had a student assembly to celebrate Diwali. Congratulations to all of the students who were courageous and participated in the assembly. Happy Diwali for all of those who are celebrating!
