Primary Weekly Highlights: Rocks, Fossils and Volcanoes 🪨🪵🌋




Primary Weekly Highlights: Rocks, Fossils and Volcanoes 🪨🪵🌋
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As I visited lessons this week, I could not help but be impressed by our students in Year 3. They have been coming to the end of their unit about rocks, fossils and volcanoes. 

Their learning began with some discussions and reflections connecting to the students’ prior knowledge of materials. This included some deeper learning around the three types of rock: igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. This then led to learning about fossils and how they are useful today which in turn led to understanding about soil and how it is made. The students also explored the concepts of historical primary and secondary sources. 




The next steps to the end goal involved finding out and learning about volcanoes including features, what happens when a volcano erupts, what is a volcanic crater and how does lava move. The students then used the knowledge learned to write about several aspects of volcanoes including why and how they erupt and whether all volcanoes are dangerous. 

In order to build further foundations for their end goal, the students then began identifying the features of websites and webpages using Google sites. This included the use of features such as content, weblinks, text boxes, images and video and basic page layout. The students then prepared all that they had learned and began building a webpage about volcanoes to demonstrate how their knowledge and understanding had grown over the course of the unit. 

What was particularly striking for me as I spoke to a range of Year 3 students this week was how knowledgeable they were and how much understanding they had developed through their learning within this unit. The children were also very passionate about what they had learned as they explained their learning journey to me. This was certainly a very memorable unit of learning for our students as they clearly have deepened their understanding of key geographical concepts and gained so much useful knowledge that they can build on in future units of learning.

Alan McCarthy
Principal - Primary Campus
 
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