Stage 4 learning wrap up

Sinead Fisher (16/12/2021)

Chorus pieces, portraits, Harry Potter and learning about the body. It doesn’t get more fun than this! This term Stage 4 has had the following units of work -- Democracy: The People’s Chorus (HSIE and English), What’s Happening to Me! (Science and PDHPE) and Parseltongue for Muggles (LOTE and TAS). We can’t forget the subjects that aren’t in TDU’s, like Music, Visual Arts and Mathematics.

Democracy: The People’s Chorus (HSIE and English)

This term in English and HSIE the driving question was: How might we deal with declining faith in democracy? Why is support for democracy eroding for young people in Western Nations? How do theatre and storytelling activate democracy? And How might we create an informative and entertaining multimodal text, that draws on chorus techniques, to offer faith in democracy again? We got to work learning the chorus conventions, learning about the building blocks for creating a democracy, discovering what happens if democracy is broken and what if Australian governments actually follow the voice of the people. Our final product for this TDU is creating a chorus piece with multimodal texts about our views of why young people have lost faith in democracy.

Overall I’ve had so much fun and I know my peers have as well, we’ve all learned so much about democracy and chorus conventions.

What’s Happening to Me?! (Science and PDHPE)

This term in science and PDHPE we’re been learning about how we can manage our bodies during puberty. Our driving question is: How can I manage my body as it changes and grows? We are learning about the human body and the changes you experience from birth through to puberty. We had a variety of quests embedding both science and PDHPE work, From cells to systems find out how you work and how you change. Each fortnight we participate in checkpoint google quizzes about what we’ve learned in those two weeks. This gives us good feedback on what we need to further research in the next few weeks before we move on to the next topic. These quizzes were our final product instead of doing a big project.

Parseltongue for Muggles (LOTE and TAS)

This term in LOTE and TAS our teachers created a Harry Potter theme by putting us into schools depending on what language we’re learning, the schools we’re Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, Durmstrang, Mahoutokoro and Castelobruxo. The first few weeks we gained our knowledge of coding, and being culturally aware and sensitive towards other people. Each week we would have to submit our work and we would get points to go towards our school. The school with the most points wins a special prize. Each fortnight we have wizarding tournaments which consist of kahoots and testing our knowledge of coding, being culturally sensitive and of course Harry Potter. Our final product for this TDU is creating a culturally sensitive translator, which is a hard project but we are currently in the prototyping stages. Overall this project has embedded culture and coding into the work really well, and I know our peers and I have grown from this experience and knowledge we will cherish throughout our life.

Music

In the first few weeks of school, we’re developing deeper into Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander music, our final product was creating an instrument that shared a story with the community about where your instrument came from. I loved this project because our stage got creative and I know we all worked super hard to produce a playable instrument that replicated an Aboriginal instrument.

In the second part of the term, we’re looking into Australian artists, where we had the choice to either learn to play the guitar, ukulele or keyboard and learn a song that was written by an Australian artist. This project tested a lot of our comfort zones through performing in our classes. But all the performances I watched were amazing!

Visual Arts

This term in VA we’ve been learning about the portrait, what is a portrait? How can we represent the cultural frames through the portrait? We’ve had theory work which gave us the opportunity to look at other portraits and see the depth and helped us gain knowledge moving forward towards our final product. We also learned to express a portrait using photoshop, drawing, photographs, symbols, objects and sculptures which gave us the choice moving forward, how we wanted to make our portrait of ourselves for our final product. The portraits came out super cool and I learnt a lot about the identity of people in my class because of this exercise.

Mathematics

Learning mathematics online was really interesting and a new way of learning for all classes. This term my class has done the topics -- Rates and ratios, Algebra and complex equations. For example in our rates and radios assessment, we had to find the value of what pizza shop has the best value of the size of the pizza, this made us learn about real-life mathematics. In algebra, our class showed characteristics such as resilience through never giving up on learning. In the topic of complex equations, we learnt a lot through practising and solving the problems. Overall mathematics has been so much fun this term and overall this year! I look forward to learning more!

What a year! From being online, then snapping our fingers and being back at school again. I’ve had so much fun learning about my identity, making drinkable water filters, chorus conventions and being renewable and coding. Overall the topics we’ve covered this year we’re all super fun and exciting!

Bring on the new year!