In Class 6, we have followed the history from the heights of Greek civilization, which we learned about last year, and on to the founding of Rome, starting with the story of Romulus and Remus.

We have been discovering, with wonder and amazement, how the strivings of individuals, both good and bad, in many ways led to changes in history and the rise of the Roman Empire. We hope you like some of the photos of our Roman main lesson book work.

After all our hard work, it was such a treat to enjoy some authentic Roman cooking.  The children worked so well under Massimo's direction, with assistance from the wonderful Bridget.

The children cooked, cleaned the kitchen, set the tables, cleared, and washed up with teamwork and enthusiasm.  Lunch was heartily devoured, with many coming back for seconds and taking some home too!   Massimo shared some of his experiences of growing up in Rome amongst the sites and places we have been hearing about in our history lessons, too. We heard how tomatoes and potatoes were not part of the cuisine of Ancient Rome but were introduced later from the Americas.

In our Human Fertility main lesson, we have been learning about the way adolescence was not acknowledged as a separate phase of life in many traditional cultures.

Children often attended special ceremonies or ‘rites of passage’ to mark their transition from childhood to adulthood, with no time of ‘adolescence’ in between.

In this way, we are coming to see the teenage years as a special gift where we have the opportunity to find out who we are with our unique strengths and perspectives, before we take on the responsibilities of adulthood. We have been having fun with communication and trust activities, exploring what it means to really listen to others and discussing what we think are admirable human qualities. Investigating stereotypes in our culture, especially stereotypes of teenagers, has been very interesting.

We have now moved on to our Business Math main lesson, where we are experiencing some of the processes, logistics, and maths involved in organising a class business. We are running a three-week lunch order enterprise at school. Conducting market research, tallying expenses and profits, and hearing the history of the development of credit and loans are all underway. Calculating interest rates, converting decimal numbers to percentages, and graphing our results are all part of the challenges to come! In the meantime, we hope that our heartwarming cooking with an Italian theme will be helpful and nourishing lunch options over the last weeks of the term.

Finally, Class 6 has been working well in woodwork with Gill, completing the artistic outer wall of the bike shelter.  Thank you, Gill. It looks great!  We built the bike shelter in Class 3 as our building project with the help of many handy, generous parent helpers. And Heather, our wonderful woodwork teacher at the time, guided and inspired the children with the artistic panels on the inside wall.