What a magical day it was – EXCURSION DAY! The students grabbed their iPads, put their hats on and lined up outside the classroom. The excitement built rapidly as we walked to the school gate. We’d arrived… at the car park. Not much of an excursion, I suppose, but it was a nice change from sitting in the classroom. There was a serious side to our little jolly, we were learning about rotational symmetry and the teachers’ cars provided a cool, real world experience for the students to check their learning. They looked at the patterns and tried to take photos of different orders of rotation, and they did a great job. Check out their blogs to see the results of our most exciting excursion this year. This link will take you to Lucas’ Blog, and this link will lead to Grace’s Blog.

La14 are currently involved in some “secret squirrel” business. We’re making a special gift for a special person who might just happen to have a special day coming up. It’s a sad fact that modern schools are extremely strapped for cash and we have to find ways to do what we want with as little expense as possible. Because of this, our very secret project is being done with practically zero financial outlay. I’d like to be more specific than that, but all I can say is that it involves making a popstick garden fence and creating some graffiti on them. Remember, sssh, it’s a secret!

“Go back to where you came from!” Ever heard people shout this at others? Or even at yourself? Well, funny thing is, unless you’re one of our indigenous population then everyone in Australia is from somewhere other than here. The question is – where? In this blogging task you need to ask your parents, or even your grandparents, where they originated from. For instance, I’m from England, but my origins can also be traced to Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia (seems I’m a little bit Viking). Also, why did your family originally migrate? Did they have a push or a pull that influenced their decision? Were they pushed from their homes due to war, lack of jobs, no money..? Or were they pulled to Australia for the climate, better prospects for their children, job opportunities..? We have such a wonderfully multicultural classroom in LA14 so it will be fascinating to learn a little about each other as well as ourselves.

English and Maths dominate the focus in schools and are usually the only subjects that school admins appear to think have any value. This mindset does have some valid points, but I don’t ever recall any staff meetings or professional development time being given to any other areas, a great shame as these areas can be the favourites of many students and be their way into the complex world of education. Not only that, the creative, expressive and imaginative opportunities subjects like Art give students benefit them in the two “main” subjects and can become a mindful and stimulating direction (not to mention profitable) for many years to come.

This year, our wonderful new Art specialist, Mrs Harris, has already taken our students further along their creative journey and you can see three excellent examples below.

It’s taken a lot longer than usual, but we’re finally there – our blogs are up and running! It’s been a crazy term, especially as we’ve had so many changes happening around the school, but we had a big push over the last two weeks and managed to start most of our blogs and finish a lot of our work. A few standouts already are Alora, Mya and Grace, and you can click on their blogs on the Class List on the right.

The work has carried on relentlessly, but we’ve still had time for students to have a little fun and pursue their own interests. Far from being unimportant to education, it’s essential that we allow students to do the things they love at school and bring these activities into the learning if possible. Check out the photos below showing a combination of work and fun.

“Get yourself sorted out!” Your blog, that is, get your blog sorted out. This week we need to start getting serious with our blogs. What I want to see this week is a new page added, an “About Me” page which explains all the information people may need about you and stays in place permanently. The difference between a page and a post is that a page stays as it is, whereas the posts change each time a new one is added. Next, make sure you’ve deleted any widgets you aren’t going to use and that you’ve added the Class Blogs widget. You’ll also need to delete the “Hello World” post and replace it with one of your own. Finally, I’d like everyone to post a comment on any of my posts from this year. We’re quite late starting our blogs but we’ll soon have them all flying.

How can the modern teacher keep a classful of modern, social media-minded students engaged? It’s very tricky, btu we’ve really got to get imaginative with the content we provide to the students. I’ve been using the TV show My Place in the classroom for a few years now, but mostly with my year 6 students. This year, with me again having a mixed year 5/6 class, it becomes a touch trickier, but I’m still using this excellent, valuable resource. While it’s an essential teaching resource for my year 6 students and their studies of 20th Century history, I’m also showing the same episodes to my year 5 students. However, the year 5s aren’t using it for History, they (along with the year 6s) are using it as a visual novel study, looking at topics such as characterisation, symbolism, director’s intentions, and so much more. The series has also stimulated ideas for Health, Maths and technology. It’s such a great Australian resource that I just may do it all over again next year.

I’m not already counting down – honest! Six weeks have gone (still not counting) and it’s been a busy six weeks. We’ve plunged head first into this term and tried to get the foundations in place that will support the rest of what we do throughout the year. We’ve already written a compare and contrast text on two characters from our visual text; we’ve revisited place value, location and timelines in maths; we’ve looked at the Stolen Generation, early penal colonies and the Industrial Revolution; we’ve even created works of art (see pictures below), influenced by Julian Opie, the artist who created the iconic art on the famous Blur album cover. The one thing we have certainly struggled with, though, is our technology! Our fabulous Department of Education now requires us to do more in-depth permission requests (quite rightly) for all the technology we use in class. This all takes time, and it doesn’t help that my Edublogs permissions were left off the list. Consequently, we’re not quite ready to start posting yet; hopefully very soon!

Welcome to yet another year in LA14. The Australian school year runs from February to December, unlike many other nations around the world, which means we’re into our third week of 2025. I’ve changed classrooms on several occasions, but LA14 has been my home away from home for a number of years (on and off), so I was pretty happy to be allowed to stay put this year. Once again, we’re a split year 5/6 class and we’ll be juggling the curriculum to suit all the students in our class. Hopefully we’ll be able to get the blogs up and running again soon, although it’s even taken myself quite some time to get a new post written; if you’re a teacher, you’ll know how quickly time can get away from you and leave you chasing yourself in circles. Anyway, it’s time, once again, to watch this space as we begin a new year of learning and fun.

Have you ever heard the story about busses? How you can wait for ages for one to come along, and then they all come along at the same time? Well, LA14 had our own “busses” moment this week. At our assemblies (which happen every fortnight) the specialist teachers (Art, Science, Music, Phys. Ed.) hand out an award for the best class for that week. Strangely, we hadn’t won anything all year, so you can imagine how totally shocked we were when we made a clean sweep of the whole assembly; yes, we won the lot! We won Vincent’s Sunflowers (Art), the School Record (Music), the Golden Boot (Phys. Ed.) and the Electric Award (Science). Crazy! All this was thoroughly deserved, naturally, and it put a huge smile on the students faces – the best award of all!