This week, Year 6 held an Immersion Day that focused on how places around the Earth can be dangerous through the amount of natural disasters it may experience.
The children learned that tectonic plates and their range of movements, can create a variety of different disasters and changes to the natural world: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the formation of mountains being some examples. The children were able to express their movement through an immersive dance lesson; during this lesson the children were able to perform as an erupting volcano and also as if they were in an earthquake. This provided the children an opportunity to act out emotion using the movement of their limbs, musical instruments and facial expressions.
Another highlight of the day was the news reporting lesson. After learning about the different tectonic plate boundaries, Year 6 were tasked to research as case study and provide a news report on it to the rest of the class. Through this lesson, we saw an incredible amount of teamwork come to fruition - from the children helping each other to understand their case studies, to identifying which plate boundary could have been the cause of the disaster, but also carefully considering the impact a natural disaster of such a high magnitude would have on civilians. Some excellent new reporting was done by Year 6, and some awards were given out for the reporting of natural disasters!
After being introduced to tectonic plates and the impact they can have on the natural world, the children put on their seismologist/volcanologist hats to plot out where natural disasters across the world could happen. Through this lesson the children found a pattern that most of these disasters occurred on fault lines and volcanic zones. Posters were made afterwards to warn people about the dangers of natural disasters in these specific areas.
Altogether, Immersion Day was truly a groundbreaking experience for our young geographers! The Year 6 children thoroughly enjoyed the day and it has served as a great introduction to the topic this term.
