Berowra Public School offers students specialist activities in the form of 'Interest groups'. These are open to any student in year 3-6, who are not part of a PSSA team. Activities are selected based on teachers' specialities and students' interests. As such, some activities are on offer in selected terms/years only, whilst others may be on offer year round.
Interest groups run at 2 different times in the year, to fit in with PSSA.
Summer Interest Groups- Fridays 9:20am- 10:am
Winter Interest Groups- Fridays 12:15am- 1:30pm
Current and past interest groups activities include:
- Gardening
- Drawing
- String Art
- Hour of Code
- Photography with ipads
- Computers
- Ceramics
- Robotics
- Cooking
- Specialist sport (e.g. football)
- Maths enrichment
Example activities in interest groups:
Term 1 2014 Gardening:
In the garden, the interest group students have cleared the old enclosed garden (now called the Nursery) and are planting seeds so that the seedlings can be raised in this area for classes to plant in the boxes in the new garden.
All of the present plants in the garden were raised from seedlings last year. The garden interest group also do the Friday watering and harvest anything that hasn't been harvested by the classes during the week. The harvest gets cut up at lunch time and is either shared with the class who has been rostered to water that week or taken onto the playground for eating. The kids come running.
Students will also be utilising the computer room to research plants, seasons that they grow, pests etc. This mixes physical work with literacy and numeracy.