Cannon Hill State School

Philosophy teaches our students to be:

• focused and complex questioners
• critical and respectful listeners
• thoughtful and reasoned speakers and thinkers
• building on others ideas and be intellectually cooperative
• exploring disagreements constructively

Building Learning Power (BLP) teaches our students to:

• manage distractions and create the best environment for learning
• persevere with learning and achieve learning goals
• collaborate and add value to group learning
• have empathy and really listen to others when learning
• make connections with learning and build a powerful knowledge base

Philosophy teaches our students to be:

• provide reasons with evidence when thinking
• consider different viewpoints
• wonder and be curious about the world
• describe and question what they see and hear
• uncover complexity and investigate what lies beneath the surface of learning
• capture the heart of learning and form conclusions from what they know and understand

Learning new ideas:

• We use visual arts to find things out.
• Creating in the arts gives opportunity for the unexpected to occur; this can lead to new ways of seeing and thinking.
• Just as we teach the skills of English we also need to teach the skills of the arts to our children.
• Creating art improves ability to focus and concentrate.

Understanding ideas:

• By learning and understanding the skills of the arts, children understand visual communication.
• Children who understand arts languages can read the subtle messages of popular media.
• The language of the arts is used in popular media such as advertising, web pages, movies, TV and magazines.

Communicating ideas:

• Written text is not the only way to express thinking - images also do that.
• Visual arts show us some of what children are thinking and understanding.
• The arts create a language of expression.
• Children who are skilled in these arts languages can effectively express their thinking through them.
• Through arts, children learn another set of communication skills that support written and verbal expression.

Healthy living

• Preparing and eating delicious nutritious food
• Learning about and appreciating fresh foods
• Exercise in the fresh air
• Growing healthy relationships through working as a team towards a positive common goal (eg a garden bed, a meal)
• Understanding our natural environment and creating beautiful learning places

Maths, Literacy, Sose, Technology, Science

• Measurement, estimation, calculation
• Weekly journal - oral language
• Vocabulary development
• Technical language - relating to gardening, environment, cooking, recipes, procedures, wildlife
• Sustainable practices, organic permaculture

Active Learning

• Preparing and eating delicious nutritious food
• Learning about and appreciating fresh foods
• Exercise in the fresh air
• Growing healthy relationships through working as a team towards a positive common goal (eg a garden bed, a meal)
• Understanding our natural environment and creating beautiful learning places

Benefits for students

• Can demonstrate how they have progressed with their learning.
• Can show what their goals are, how they have been working towards them and what new goals they are setting.
• Time to talk with parents with the focus on learning.
• Parent support to help set new goals.
• Teacher support to help explain their learning, set new goals and identify strategies.
• Learning is clear and understood.
• Celebrate their learning successes.

Benefits for parents

• Are able to listen to their child discuss their learning.
• Can ask questions of their child that are directly related to their learning.
• Can support their child in setting learning goals.
• Share a common understanding with their child and the teacher about what is happening with their learning.

Benefits for teachers

• Are able to listen to the child and parent discuss the learning that is occurring.
• Share a common understanding of the child's learning with the child and parents.

In Science Lessons children are

• Investigating cell biology.
• Exploring the function of the organelles in plant and animal cells.
• Exploring the structure of the organelles in plant and animal cells.
• Discovering what a plant and animal cell looks like under a microscope.
• Using Venn diagrams to understand the difference and similarities between an animal and plant cell.
• Drawing images of a cell from microscope observations.

How are Numeracy and literacy part of

• Working collaboratively to build science knowledge.
• Exploring measurement units (microscale) for cell biology.
• Discovering the relative size of a cell compared to what we can see with the naked eye.
• Labelling a microscope and writing a scientific report.
• Unpacking the information in a scientific report to build knowledge and finding opportunities for further investigations.
• Using scientific words to explain phenomena.

A word from our children about science

• Science is more than mixing potions (Pantea, Year 5))
• You can learn about anything if you're a scientist (Dylan G, Year 7)
• Biodiversity is used to describe species living in an area...it is used to summarise life on Earth (Tyler Bo, Year 7)
• We are learning about plant cells in science...in the cell they have a organelle which creates photosynthesis (Tom, Year 4)
• There are different types of cells. I used to think that they were the same structure. Now I know that there is a lot of difference between the plant animal and bacteria. When I look through the microscope I can see that they are all very different. (Robert,Year 5)