Week three in semester two

Hi all
Well we have had a really good start to the second half of the year and this week we went on a field trip to the Korean War Memorial Museum. This is an amazing place and the displays and information are incredibly well put together. Even since the visit with last years Grade 5 class so much more has been added especially to the floor with the history and story of the Korean war. The students enjoyed the day finding out more about conflict and this prompted some really good discussion in class, specifically around one of our lines of Inquiry, Causes of conflict.
The challenge ahead for us in this unit to to discover how and why 'Peaceful solutions to conflict lead to a better quality of life'.
We spent some time at the end of the week putting together our shared knowledge and understanding of the Korean War, producing timelines with what we considered were the most significant events.
Over the next few weeks we will continue to look at current events to gain a better understanding of the problems and issues in the world, and more importantly try to think of ways that our action can make a difference. This leads us nicely into our exhibition unit.
I have shared some photos from this week.
Till next time
Mike

Semester 2 begins

Hi everyone
Welcome back to an exciting second half to the year. We were very sad to lose Souta at the Christmas break but we have three new students this semester. Alexandr, Suhha and John have all started this week.
Our unit of Inquiry for this quarter is about sharing the planet and in particular the issue of conflict. We will be looking at a lot of different conflicts, researching ones that we know about but also trying to broaden our knowledge on some more unfamiliar ones. An important part of the unit will be discovering ways in which we can find peaceful solutions to conflicts.

Just before we finished in December we undertook a small measurement unit where we investigated area, perimeter and circumference. We used this knowledge to create scale models of Castles. I have included a couple of pictures of some of our final products.

I would like to give a special thank you to the wonderful Grade 5 Mum's who helped provide a (farewell to Souta, Christmas party and birthday cake for me) combined celebration on the last day. We had a lot of fun and it was a great way to say goodbye to our friend Souta.

Over the next few weeks we will start preparing for the Exhibition unit and because of this we have started looking at current events. Through this I am hoping to get the students better prepared about some of the issues going on in the world in which they are living.

I am also going to post some of our math strategy videos in the next couple of days, so keep a look out for those.
Mike