Year 6 Term 2 2021

Dear Parents and Caregivers,

Welcome back for Term 2. I hope that the past few weeks have been relaxing and that you have managed to spend quality time with loved ones. It was lovely to chat with many of you last term, to share your child’s successes and goals.  If you were unable to schedule a meeting last term and would like to have a learning conversation, please contact me and we will aim to schedule a meeting, over the next few weeks. Even though there is still plenty of time left in the school year I will gently remind families that your child should be enrolled into a Secondary School for 2022.  

In Week 3, the Year 6 students will attend a Start Smart Financial Literacy workshop run by the Commonwealth Bank.  The workshop aims to equip students with the confidence and competence needed to make smart decisions about money.   Students revisit the concept of ‘See It, Earn It, Save It’ with a focus on budgeting skills. They will learn how to prepare a budget for a one-off charitable fundraising event. Following this, students will explore how to implement an ongoing budget for the achievement of personal financial goals. 

In Week 7, the Year 5 and 6 students will attend an interactive Science incursion titled “The Matter Show”, run by Mobile Science Education.  With help from a few litres of liquid nitrogen, a few chemicals and a gas burner, students will be shown how the particle model is used to explain the behaviour of solids, liquids and gases. 

Seesaw has been a fantastic platform to communicate with families and share student learning. In an important final year of Primary School, it is crucial that families and I continue to work collaboratively to ensure your child is learning and thriving at school. As such, please continue to engage with these posts and should you have any specific concerns regarding your child’s learning, please email or come see me, if you require a chat.

Anthony Sicari
Year 6 Teacher

English
Our genre topics are Exposition and Information Reports. Within these genres, students are learning to write persuasively and invoke action to make change as well as create texts for informative purposes. They will understand how the use of text structures, language features and specific details can provide emphasis and support their point of view. We will continue to focus on our phonemic awareness and spelling patterns through the Soundwaves Spelling Program with a key focus on prefixes and suffixes. The reading focus for this term will be to analyse exposition texts to identify how language features, images and vocabulary are used to represent the authors ideas. Our learning around exposition texts will become useful in other curriculum areas such as Humanities and Social Sciences. Students will continue to borrow books from the Loft on Monday each week.

Mathematics
There are a number of focus areas for Mathematics this Term. Students will continue to explore BIDMAS by learning to work left to write with the order of operations to write and decode number sentences.  Students will explore properties of angles by learning to measure angles to a point and use mathematical skills to prove angles add up to 360 degrees and to identify missing as well as vertically opposite angles. Students will learn to use the 4 quadrants of a Cartesian Plane to identify coordinates and use Longitude and Latitude. In the back end of the term, Students will focus on financial literacy by exploring decimals and percentages to work out discounts on items. Students will complete an investigation titled “How Pricey is Petrol”. In this Investigation, students research the relative value of petrol and other liquids. By comparing the price per litre of various liquids students can identify how pricey petrol is and how beneficial petrol discount is.

Religious Education
Students are learning about the Creed and Trinity. Students will identify that the Creeds are important writings that express what Christians believe; Christians believe in one God who is a Trinity of love and that Jesus is the Son of God, the chosen one whom God promised. Students will also celebrate Pentecost and identify the significance of Pentecost to our faith.

Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS)
In HASS students will explore the area of Civics and Citizenship and are learning to be active and informed Australian and Global Citizens. Students will explain the importance of people, institutions and processes to Australia’s democracy and legal system. They will identify where new laws come from and how they become laws and describe the rights and responsibilities of Australian citizens and the obligations they may have as global citizens.

Technologies
Students will be learning about Design Technologies. Students will describe competing considerations in the design of products, services and environments, taking into account sustainability. They describe how design and technologies contribute to meeting present and future needs. Students will investigate how electrical energy can control movement, sound and light in designed product and systems. Students will create simple circuits and create a wind-powered system to generate power to light a LED bulb.

Science (Mr Monti)
Students are learning about Chemical Science. Students will compare and classify different types of observable changes to materials.  They will formulate a hypothesis to investigate, whether changes to matter can be reversible or irreversible.  They will collect, organise and interpret their data.  Students will describe and analyse relationships in their data and make a 3D model to represent their findings.

Visual Art (Mr Monti)
Students will use visual conventions and visual arts practices to express a personal view in their artwork, about “Is it possible for one idea to change the world for the better?”.  They will explore the influence of Optical (Op) Art and demonstrate different techniques and processes in planning and making Op Art.  Students will explain how their artwork illustrates the Op Art style.

Health  
In Health, students are learning to maintain positive relationships and contribute positively and safely to society. They will explore this by recognising the influence of emotions on behaviours and discuss factors that influence how people interact. They will explore ways to communicate and identify their emotions and the emotions of others. Students will learn to report abuses of power in relationships to their trust network. 

Physical Education (Mrs Archer)
In PE students will engage in: soccer kick skills; lacrosse catching, throwing, running and dodging; long distance, cross-country running; and short and long distance, athletics running.

Japanese (Sensei Aftab)
Students are learning about Japanese Greetings, “My School” and Japanese Children’s Day. Students will focus on reading as well as writing of Hiragana and will continue to explore Kanji Symbols.

Performing Arts (Mrs Rugari)
Students will be exploring the history and development of Australian popular music through the different decades. They will collaboratively investigate the social and technological impacts within a particular decade.