The Junior School girls have enjoyed a range of learning experiences and events in the past fortnight, including more opportunities to engage in our community, thanks to easing restrictions.

Our Year 4 girls visited the Wingfield Waste Management and Recycling Depot on Monday to complement their learning in sustainability.

Though filled with a degree of trepidation about visiting ‘the dump’, they returned inspired by what they had heard and learnt - filled with enthusiasm about enacting some initiatives for change in our Junior School in the way we manage our class and yard bins to ensure we are living as sustainably as possible.

We look forward to the girls' continued learning and efforts in this area and seeing their actions have an impact.

Picnic in Nature

Our Year 1 girls were excited to attend their first Outdoor Education Day Trip on Monday, which included visiting Morialta Nature Play Park and a teddy bear’s picnic – with a focus on the girls experiencing and connecting with nature - and planned with the research that clearly demonstrates the benefits of this type of play for our children in mind.

The girls explored at their own pace, making games, investigations and engaging in ‘slow looking’ and observations. The Outdoor Education curriculum builds as our girls grow through Junior School and beyond, ensuring a sequential skillset and repertoire of experiences are developed as key learning entitlements for each girl.

Casual for a Cause

Our Year 6 Student Representative Council (SRC) Citizenship Committee held its first casual clothes day on Tuesday 29 March.

Following tradition, the Early Learning Centre to Year 6 girls' gold coin donations will go to the Bahadure School in Nepal, enabling children who would not normally have the opportunity to access education to attend consistently and board where necessary.

The girls chose the theme Fun and Festive and it was just lovely to see the joyous riot of colourful clothing, socks and ribbons on display. As always, the girls did an outstanding job organising and participating in the event.

Science Has Been Taking Off

Our Year 6 girls have been conducting experiments in Science, testing variables and measuring changes in chemical reactions. By mixing baking soda and water and adding varying amounts of vinegar, the girls created rockets that exploded all over the Junior School Courtyard!

It was fascinating to hear the girls hypothesise about the reasons some of their rockets exploded more successfully than others, observing and posing questions about how the varying levels of vinegar may be impacting the results.

Experiential learning, where a concrete experience provides a springboard for reflection and perspective-taking, is deeply valuable.

Time to think and make connections abstractly after the experience enables our students to reach conclusions, in this case collaboratively, and to then conceptualise meaning and new understandings.

This learning process then continues when students are given the opportunity to act and further experiment with what they have learnt - testing out their theories.

Online Assemblies

Our Junior School Assemblies have looked a little different so far this year, with COVID-19 restrictions requiring us to once again be flexible and creative in the way we do things.

The Year 6 SRC Executive, Evangeline, Tara and Selin, have adapted admirably to running assemblies online, with all Junior School classes joining in via WebEx and the boards in their classrooms.

They have still shared our Acknowledgment of Country, Prayer and Nominations each week, with our scheduled committee and year level items being filmed in advance and shared on the day.

This is just another way our girls and teachers continue to amaze us with their resilience, drive and enthusiasm for maintaining a connected community even when we are unable to be together physically.