Good Day Kunyung Families! 🙂
 I hope your holidays were everything your family wanted, or needed, them to be!
What bright, happy faces we were greeted with on Tuesday morning, and that included the parents! The children were so happy to see friends and teachers, and so switched on to start learning, that classrooms were alive with conversations, stories and questioning! (Whilst Monday was an extremely productive day for our staff……..work doesn’t feel right without children there!)
Our daily Reading, Writing and Maths routines are in full swing and our Inquiries have started with excitement and enthusiasm…………..children are natural inquirers as we know and the questions have been coming thick and fast already!
Our Preps are being scientists and inquiring into what makes things move! They will be looking at the BIG IDEA of CONSEQUENCES through experimenting with many different objects and discovering what makes them move and why? They will be learning the skills of being a scientist and I can’t wait to share with you their questions and findings over the next few weeks!
Our Juniors are inquiring into the processes that products go through and their BIG IDEA is CHANGE. They are visiting the YAKULT factory this week to see the origins of a product and the process these materials go through to become a useable product. The questions asked by our students at the factory have been amazing- get ready for many questions about how things are made parents!!
Our Middles started with a ‘bang’ also on Tuesday with the provocation ‘what ideas, beliefs, values are important to you’ and ‘if you had to express these to aliens how could you do it?’ Their inquiry is looking at how people express these things to others and how do we know this? The BIG IDEA is REFLECTION and what EVIDENCE can we find to support our thinking!
Our Seniors spent yesterday in Melbourne at the Immigration and Chinese Museums………their inquiry is focussed on immigration and the impact it has on individuals and communities. The students have been asked to put a box together that represents their families’ history including evidence of any movement or relocation they have been involved in.
The teachers also spent time this week inquiring! Our three Professional Learning Teams used Monday as a Project Day’. The Mathematics Team, Literacy Team and Transdisciplinary Team set goals for the day and, after expending the kind of energy you see on the Amazing Race, achieved many of the set goals. There is a common understanding at Kunyung about how we teach our students and Monday was ensuring all of our planning documents, big ideas and skill based continuums, for example, were consistent throughout the school and all up to date and accessible. It was both a productive and enjoyable day with a clear purpose. In all rooms, where teams were working, it was ‘heads down’ and work, work, work!
As I said at the start of this article, it was ‘hit the ground running’ at Kunyung this week and, when I think about it, it’s only Thursday!!!!
Look forward to seeing as many of you as possible throughout the term!
Kim Jackson
Assistant Principal