Years 5–6
2 full days
Day 1 - Incursion and Day 2 - at Bunyaville EEC
Big idea
Developing a sense of self and working with others.
Curriculum links
HPE and ICT (general capabilities) - see matrix for more details
Program overview
The Bunyaville Challenge program has been designed for Year 5 and Year 6 students and is ideal for building group and leadership skills. These skills are developed over two days, one day at your school and one day at our Centre in the Bunyaville Conservation Park, enabling your students to learn:
- their own strengths and preferred ways of learning, decision making and interacting, and those of others
- how to use a variety of ICT tools
- how to work as a team using and building on their team's strengths to complete challenges in a forest setting .
Day 1: at your school (4 hours)
During Day 1, students participate in two activities to develop an understanding of themselves and others (Strengths) and to become familiar with the ICT tools required for navigating around the forest challenge course (Bunyaville Challenge Navigation Skills).
Strengths - find and form
In the Strengths - find and form session, students discover their current strengths and preferred learning styles. This is done in a very informal way and students are amazed with the results. Centre staff will help teachers organise students into appropriate groups for the challenge on Day 2. During this session, students also participate in targeted group activities to identify qualities of a good team member. Before coming to Bunyaville, each student is asked to nominate a success criteria in each of the following skill areas to improve upon on Day 2:
- communication;
- co-operation;
- problem solving and
- resilience.
Bunyaville Challenge Navigation Skills
On Day 1, students are also introduced to the navigation skills required for Day 2's challenge at the Bunyaville Conservation Park. In this session, held in the school grounds, students participate in hands-on activities to become familiar with both the devices and the GPS App they will be using to navigate their way around the forest.
Day 2: at Bunyaville Environmental Education Centre (5 hours)
Upon arrival at Bunyaville, each group negotiates what equipment to take into the forest to complete the challenge. During the day, centre and visiting teachers play a ‘facilitators’ role where they give autonomy to each group within the realms of keeping safe (here the "process" of making decisions, cooperating and problem-solving, is more important than the end result of completing the challenge).
To find their way along the Bunyaville forest trails, students apply their iPad and GPS skills, each team engaging in cooperative decision-making and problem-solving to gain the information they need to complete the challenge and unlock a treasure chest. Whilst journeying through the forest, students also reflect on their chosen success criteria skills, considering progress on developing their understanding of and skills in communication, co-operation, problem-solving and resilience.
For this program you will need to refer to the relevant Curriculum Activity Risk Assessments.