Junior School
Primary Years Programme Exhibition The Year 6 team and Primary Years Programme Coordinator, Lisa Bonazza, take us on a journey through the process of Exhibition 2021 that has occurred through online learning.
The exhibition journey begins with the ‘tuning in’ phase, where students are challenged and inspired by a range of guest speakers. Each of these lectures begins to build the students conceptual understanding of the PYP Transdisciplinary Theme “Where we are in place and time.” During this phase, students hear from experts across a variety of fields who speak about their life journey, reflecting on the decisions they have made, where they have drawn inspiration from and how they have overcome adversity. This year, students attended lectures from Dr Nhi Nguyen, an Intensive Care Specialist at Nepean Hospital, Rachel Lack from the Class of 2012 and 2021 Olympic Softballer, Jon Tse from the class of 2005, a business entrepreneur and founder of the Karst stone paper company and Lisa Sthalekar from the Class of 1997 and former captain of Australia's international women's cricket team. Through this process students were challenged to draw connections between their own life journey and the exhibition Central Idea: “The future can be shaped by past experiences”. David Steel
The finding out stage of exhibition is the process in which students engage in the brainstorming, planning and researching of new information centred around their passions. ‘The future can be shaped by past experiences’ is the central idea for this year’s exhibition. Students deconstructed this central idea, exploring their passions and constructing individual lines of inquiry to critically examine globally significant issues. They were able to explain and define the key conceptual understandings in order to springboard their inquiry. Students chose real-life issues based on their passions and made connections to the sustainable development goals. To assist in their investigations, students developed individual lines of inquiry, providing a scaffold for their research as they recorded their findings through notes and summaries. Throughout the finding out stage, the learning community, which is made up of students, teachers, mentors and experts, are enabled to think as researchers and gather information from a variety of sources. Students are encouraged to go beyond the known and are challenged to use their skills to acquire new knowledge. Hannah Yeow
6 • The Barker • Issue 133 • Summer 2021
