Picture - planting ‘bee bombs’ to attract more bees.

Mrs Inkson (Head of Year 6)

With just over three weeks to go until our Year 6 Exhibition, this week our focus has been on ‘Action’. A central theme of the Primary Years Programme (PYP) is that learning inspires and empowers students to take action and this really comes through in the Exhibition. All the groups are now actively engaged in their inquiry, researching their global issues and the questions they had about them. This has naturally led to the groups thinking about what they can do to help – How can we help reduce deforestation? How can we help promote gender equality? How can we reduce plastic use? This is where student action takes place.

Action can take many forms – from starting a campaign to sharing knowledge so others understand the issue to simply changing their own or their families behaviours. Students are encouraged to think about how they can have an impact, whether it be large or small, on the global issue they are interested in. Many of our global issues are focused in a different part of the world so how can our actions even have an impact? Some groups started off by thinking that a great action would be to simply raise money for a relevant charity – and although this is a valuable activity, we soon realised that a much more powerful action is to try to change people’s behaviours and attitudes.  It is very easy to give money to a problem but the problem still exists. 

As a year group we have some truly impressive actions taking place – here are some examples:

• Groups are running poster competitions within the Junior School to help spread information about the global issues and raise awareness. View some example HERE.
• A group is setting up a clothing collection to collect unwanted ‘fast fashion’ so that it can be redistributed to families in need.
• Groups are filming documentaries, assemblies and lessons for different year groups in the Junior School to help spread information about the global issues and raise awareness.
• A group has set a vegetarian and vegan cooking challenge.

We look forward to seeing the impact of all of our actions!