Indigenous Australia and Fighting for Rights

The reading rotations finished off on a positive note.  The work the students completed has definitely shown me their strengths and weaknesses.  My focus for the week was on comprehension, summarizing, and having a better understanding of terms used in the texts we are reading.  Overall the class definitely needs to revisit summarizing skills.  Many of them struggle to pick out the main idea in a piece of writing, and find it difficult to re-word the ideas to form their own sentence.  This skill is something that Lauren wants to work on with the students this year and hopefully improve upon.  She has found that when students research they do not know what information is worth using and also tend to copy straight from the books or websites.  This will be a focus in my reading groups for the week of March 10th-14th.

I do have some sad news to share. The Grade 6 camp has been cancelled. Alan was skeptical because this past Tuesday brought some threatening weather because of heat and winds up to 120 km an hour.  There are still some fires burning and with winds that hire there is risk for many of the surrounding communities.  On the high threat day, Susan and I both packed bags with things from the house that we would really want in case something did happen where we were unable to come back to the house.  It was very scary to think about and really put into perspective what people all across Victoria have been dealing with over the past month and a half.  Nothing happened and we were safe, but I found myself very anxious all day just thinking about what may happen.

With camp being cancelled, I have taken on the planning of everything except the Integrated Studies.  Lauren wants to get through a few more of the major topics before I take this over, and she also wants to guide me through a few things first.  I am a bit nervous about teaching this area because we are studying Indigenous Australia and even after doing heaps of research I feel like there is so much I do not know or have not heard about.  This topic is more of a learning with the students than me teaching the students.  To make myself more comfortable, I am looking at ways that I like to introduce topics to students and finding activities that I believe the students will enjoy and be engaged in.

We have a very big weekend ahead of us, and there is lots to prepare for school next week as well as pack my things!