Year 5 and 6 at St Thomas: A skill set to change the world
Year 5 and 6 are vital primary school years for building a bridge to high school. Real world learning takes on another dimension at this age. In this rapidly changing world, we want to give our graduates a solid foundation in learning with the resilience, versatility and self-efficacy to guide them through all that’s ahead.
We have created extraordinary opportunities for Year 5 and 6 students to own their learning and go deeper, bolder and bigger with their ideas. These are some of the typical Year 5 and 6-only activities St Thomas senior students love being involved in:
- Website design and coding.
- Video production. External experts join us at school for a week and lead Year 5 and 6 through movie making, from script writing to shooting, editing, production and beyond. Each child creates a movie that is premiered at our annual Movie Night.
- Creating picture books with a specialist art teacher.
- Musical production. Senior students take responsibility for props, costumes, research, choreography and more.
- Students are given a topic and interview a leader in their field, creating, editing and embedding a professional podcast into a website.
Year 5 and 6 students are immersed in project learning that gives them meaningful connection with their studies and focuses on developing outcomes in:
- Collaboration
- Critical thinking
- Creativity
- Citizenship
- Character
Our aim is to unleash in our senior students the belief that “I can change my world”, backed up by the skills and tools to do that.
Year 6 leadership
Every Year 6 student at St Thomas is given a leadership opportunity reserved for these older students. Students choose what and how they want to lead younger grades in an area of impact. Some of our current student-led initiatives are:
- Environment team – have set up a worm farm, including the research and rationale behind it, and the purchase and ongoing responsibility of the colony. They have also made bees wax wraps as a way of spreading the plastic-free message through the school.
- Wellbeing team – organising dance parties, chalk drawing in the playground, games at lunchtime and morning tea, and opportunities to write happy letters to friends or teachers.
- Prayer, liturgy and creative arts teams – they have combined their interests and written and filmed movies for class and family prayer while in Covid-19.
- Colour house teams – coordinate lunch time games like goal shooting to win house points.
- Social justice team – organise whole school fundraising for a range of projects including Caritas, our sister parish in Letefoho Timor L’este and Canisus Kitchen.
