Dear Parents,
This has been a hugely exciting week in Grade 6 as we launched our new Where We Are in Place and Time unit of inquiry. The central idea of this unit is ‘Human migration is a response to challenges, risks and opportunities.
As a provocation to get the children to reflect upon why people might migrate we created 6 fictional (different) sized spaces upon the floor in the G6 classrooms. Each country offered differing levels of education, health care, salary, crime rates etc. This was very engaging and exciting for the students as they got to apply and then (in most cases) be allocated to a country that they had not chosen. Please see this week’s Seesaw for more information and also please speak to your child about this activity. Some photos from this provocation are below.
This will now lead into us inquiring into what factors might cause people to want to migrate to a new country. We will be hosting a ‘mock’ UN conference next week for the 6 nations that focuses on how we can build empathy and understand different perspectives.
Would you like to come into G6 and share a migration story? Your story might connect to one of these ideas, or might be something completely different. The story might be your own personal migration story or perhaps a family member, colleague or friend’s story that you think needs to be retold. It might be serious, or funny, or factual or any way that tells your story. It could focus on the challenges, risks, opportunities or perhaps none / all of these ideas. It can be just told in front of the G6 students or you could use a slide with visuals / maps etc or any way that you feel helps convey the key parts of your story. Please email me at m.cromwell@abisoman.com if you are willing to do this.
In Literacy we have been looking at using figurative language and in particular how we use similes, metaphors, hyperbole and and alliteration to really create powerful sentences that creates a strong visual for the reader. Please find some examples on Seesaw. See if you can come up with some examples of each of these as a family.
In Mathematics, we have been inquiring into estimation and rounding of numbers, as well as starting to look at strategies for how to start to break down tricky worded problems using the CUBES acronym. This is the first time the students have used this approach and it is something we will develop and build upon in the coming weeks.
Next Week:
Unit of Inquiry
- Exploring our first line of inquiry ‘Reasons for migration over time’.
- United nations Summit for Empathy
- Begin to explore the social, economic, political, environmental, and other factors that have motivated human migration throughout history
- Guests sharing their own Migration stories, followed by student led Q+A session
Literacy
- Finishing our inquiry into ‘understanding figurative language and vocabulary’
- Following the writing process to create ‘I am…’ paragraphs to go with their self-portraits
Mathematics
- Use mental and written strategies for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing whole numbers and decimals in real-life situations
- Develop work on using CUBES acronym to solve real life problems
Have a great long weekend,
Matt