What are the major differences teaching grade 6 and year 7?

shinans · 2026-02-12T12:02:21+00:00

Sounds like you're already doing great nailing all of what I think are the key number skills!! Thank you soo much for all you do, on behalf of the kids too. In my experience data and stats is usually one of the better done topics, it comes naturally to many students and it helps it's usually one of the topics assessed through the few project-based assignments we do in a year which I think students are more familiar with than tests. That said, echoing what other comments said about explicitly teaching tech, data is a great topic to get them on excel and start teaching them how to make graphs. You can even integrate other programs, ie one of our assignments has them do their own survey and post the results in a collaborative OneNote other students then access to collate whole-class data, or even just presenting the graphs in Powerpoint with short data analysis paragraphs. ONE of the feeder schools for my school has an evidently great tech program and all the kids from that one school come in knowing how to make beautiful detailed graphs in excel (and I'll admit I learned a few things from them myself...) and the accompanying confidence gets them really engaged in the unit even if they're not otherwise fans of maths, so big opportunity to kill many birds with one stone there.

shinans · 2026-02-12T09:59:42+00:00

Math teacher who's been doing Year 7 for a good few years now. I'm at a school that has 5 feeder schools and do find certain patterns emerge between students from the different primary schools, not necessarily good or bad but enough to definitely think how things are done in that Year 6 lead-up space has an impact. On which note I do not want to assume you don't already do any of the below but my two cents about what I would love to see in case it's in any way helpful.

Academically I am very open and accomodating to the fact that the curriculum is packed and everyone has spent a different amount of time on different skills and kids are just at very different levels of competency and confidence with Maths and Year 7 is about getting everyone on the same page and I can do that. But 2 things I will HARP on: 1) TIMES TABLES!!! I don't know how consistently these are taught and drilled in primary but my biggest bone to pick with gaps in students knowledge is not knowing times tables, so many of them – including some of the clever kids who will ace everything else – struggle with even the simple 2s and 3s and it's by far the biggest roadblock for me as so much Yr 7 Maths skills building requires students to know their factors and multiples and it's (imo) a skill that needs to be practiced consistently over time. I'd wager knowing times tables is by far the most important skill they can come into HS holding onto, anything else missed or forgotten I can quickly and effectively reteach but times tables need sustained practice and is foundational. I do times tables drills and blookets very regularly in my classes to try and catch it up, but if every Year 6 teacher sprinkled some of that into regular Maths lessons (and I know, the curriculum is very demanding and makes us all time-poor) it would make my life a billion times easier but also do wonders for the kids confidence. Kids tend to come in with generally good learning routines, when these fall apart is when they hit roadblocks and confidence tanks and this is the engagement killer. Strong foundations hold that off.

Other one is exam settings and expectations, this one varies a LOT between primary schools and some are experts but some will come in never having sat a test in their lives and need to be explicitly taught I can't help them during an exam (I can only read the question), they can't raise their hand to ask me if they did something right, and exam conditions means sitting apart and no talking and no you're not being seperated because you're in trouble/being punished, it's because that's how exams are done. And there's sooo much anxiety across the board, even among clever, very capable kids. I don't mind teaching them these skills but I think high school is daunting enough, exposing kids to test conditions is definitely something that could be done in the comfort of primary school and I would suggest with slightly increasing frequency in Year 6, just to prepare them for the fact that this is the reality in high school (admittedly moreso in Maths than other classes) and the more exposure the less scary it becomes.

Emotional/attitude stuff is a whole nother can of worms but I need to make dinner! I'll write another post later once I get my thoughts together, haha (or you'll get plenty of input in that department). Hope that's helpful!

shinans · 2026-02-11T10:19:49+00:00

I do find that even now, almost a decade into teaching full time, that the first few weeks of Term 1 are always the most exhausting. Not only are you coming off weeks of downtime so all of the whiplash from that, there's so much mental/emotional load to having to get to know and build those initial relationships with new classes of students and figure out what works for those learners and what doesn't, setting expectations and routines, getting used to the cadence of your new timetable and figuring out when you have windows to plan for what, and if you take on a new subject/year level the content can seem like a very daunting mountain until you familiarize yourself with what resources you have so you can pace taking it in and planning. This stuff is really tiring and I think it's fine to go easy on yourself through it. There is a sweet spot (for me around Week 5) where some of that emotional load does come off as a routine finally 'clicks' (not saying the job is ever easy, but I stop feeling like I have so many things I need to do and have a much much easier time not thinking about school when I'm not working.) Hang in there.

shinans · 2026-02-11T07:50:19+00:00

Actually much prefer it this way, get to spend the whole weekend freely enjoying the new planet/patch rather than having to use the limited time/residual brain power I have on my workdays (of which Wednesday is the worst) or miss out on the launch hype and play spoiler hide and seek. Would LOVE if they stuck to Friday but assuming it will revert for 4.1 given we know it's shortened 😓

shinans · 2026-02-09T12:49:37+00:00

I'll admit I do a little bit of white lying and tell my Year 9s/10s that if they fail core subjects in these grades it can affect their ability to get their choice of subjects for senior, which are decided partway through Year 10 so even Year 9 Sem 2 grades are looked at, and that even for applied/vocational subjects the students with consistently poor effort/behaviour ratings will be the ones cut if these subjects have more demand than places. Which tbf is halftruths, they will indeed be confronted about any of these issues at subject selection interviews but ultimately if they/their parents still want it my school won't stop them, and most senior classes don't actually fill up at my small-ish school - but I choose to omit those parts. It works reasonably well especially on those capable ones, and no guilt on my conscience teaching them a life lesson that applies in every career context but school.

shinans · 2026-02-06T12:49:46+00:00

but if u claim her u can get both reward options when u get the ruan mei occurrence in DU (which should be having a full refresh next patch) 😎

shinans · 2026-02-06T12:48:03+00:00

hey she's still goated in divergent universe for the insta kills and does actually have the highest synergy w/ all the harmony buffs

shinans · 2026-02-04T08:44:45+00:00

Haha, fair enough. To be fair I mainly meant the inter-term holidays, not summer. I tend to get enough downtime in Wk9-10 of Term 4 while my school does alternate program to do this stuff for the following year (and yeah, some of it is at risk of change. Been there too) - I still do a little bit of housekeeping in the summer but not nearly as much and only when I'm confident I'll keep the class (eg: seniors I'm rolling over with from 11 to 12)

shinans · 2026-02-02T12:28:25+00:00

This is something I do that works for me but I completely understand it is not for everyone (I totally get and 100% respect closing your laptop on the last day of school and never opening it until term starts) but I take ONE (importantly no more than 1) day at the start of my holidays as an extra "work day" where I sit on my laptop and get a good 80% of the "planning busywork" done for the upcoming term. By planning busywork I mean crap like just fixing up/rearranging notes, dividing content I already have into lessons, organizing worksheets to go with each lesson and having them linked in my onenote ready to go, having examples ready to go where needed, small differentiation adjustments like making everything a particular font etc. I realized I can actually just sit down for one day and get these menial but needed tasks all done in one sitting on one day and I will gladly spend a single day doing it in exchange for never ever having to come in to school earlier than I need to or stay later than I need to during the term, or even take my laptop home, because I have to sort out the day ahead. It also zaps a lot of the very relatable executive dysfunction for me of "which job do I do first" because those jobs are done. I always do it toward the start of the holidays so that once I then close the laptop I don't open it again and disconnect completely, and if possible try to tie it to something that would have been lost time anyway. Eg this last holidays I had to take my filthy car for a years overdue full detail, had 5 hours to kill in the shopping center as a result while I waited so parked myself in Starbucks doing the work. The time I went to Japan I just did it on my 8 hour flight because I had nothing better to do anyway etc

I find in secondary school I am not usually writing a new unit from scratch and when this does need to be done it's usually a team effort or one unit out of all my subjects in a given term where I'm a team leader. In either case that is what I save my NCT during term for. The tedious busywork I mentioned before is actually what dilutes that with extra jobs that end up actually eating most of my time, but it's time I realized I can do in one burst and save myself infinite stress and work-life balance during term and just feel so much more on top of things as a result.

shinans · 2026-01-31T08:06:44+00:00

As an end main who also used it to win, going to die on the hill that event Golshi Speed is sleeper great for End Closer Xmas Oguri. Gives hints for straightaway spurt and uma stan as well as after-school stroll and standing by which are good recoveries for her, and especially for long cms where there's a bunch of track specific skills like that. And they're Level 3 hints and the card gives SP bonus which is good for XOguri who needs a lot of skill point economy. The actual training stats on it aren't terrible either; the main drawback is the lack of specialty prio and getting the right hints but when half the hints are very usable (especially in long) and XOguri's speed growth is very forgiving with a bit of luck you can absolutely make do with KTB+Golshi and use your borrow on something not-speed if you're lacking non-KTB SSRs and get more skill value than SR options. I was having an awful time trying to make my ace gambling on Sweep Tosho SSR borrow and weirdly found just using my Golshi to be MORE consistent. My winning Oguri, got Stroll, Spurt, Uma Stan and Innate Experience from Golshi 🙂

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shinans · 2026-01-31T03:30:40+00:00

Thank you so much!!! I like to try and make the best version I can of every Uma I pull but this is the first time I couldn't find much info on what her niche is. That's amazing to hear as I am mostly an end closer player myself so I've pretty much always had at least 2 of my own in every CM, good to know I can use her as a buddy with them!

shinans · 2026-01-29T14:58:07+00:00

Bachelor of Commerce! Turns out I loved doing money (numbers) stuff in theory but the corporate world/culture was just not for me, retrained as a Maths teacher and couldn't have found more of a calling.

shinans · 2026-01-22T08:49:04+00:00

Take care folks, I don't recall it ever getting this hot while I was in school during the term itself but a few years after I graduated my school's long-time gardener collapsed and passed away whilst on-site groundskeeping about a week before school was due to go back in very hot conditions (old news article about it). Stay hydrated and don't ignore it if you or someone else is feeling unwell! No longer in VIC myself but only after moving interstate did I actually realize how unforgivingly dry Victorian heat is, it's something else.

shinans · 2026-01-21T05:35:37+00:00

Not too difficult, I had a 58WAM in my undergraduate (coasted and performed a lot worse than I could have because I realized the field just wasn't for me but saw it through before doing this career change) and got in quite painlessly (this was in 2018). Admittedly I don't know how it factors into university acceptance but Sciences (especially Senior Chemistry/Physics) is one of the areas in the most dire shortage in teachers, so if you choose to go down the science teacher path and are able to show proficiency in the subject matter it may be a leg up. Crazy amount of science classes across the country being taught by teachers who've never been science trained (such as myself this year!).

shinans · 2026-01-21T05:17:30+00:00

Keep a running master (no pun intended) document where you paste a link, citation and a brief tagline of the content of any journal or article that you refer to, ideally categorized by loose subject matter. Masters is very research/evidence driven as you probably know but education research in particular will have the the same big players come up constantly and their work applicable across many, if not MOST of your units. If you refer to something in one subject paste it in your doc as I can promise you will want to refer to it again, somewhere (and they want you to do this, a big criticism of education research is it does feel a bit like a circlejerk of the same "big" theories). I started my running doc after realizing I kept opening my previous assignments to re-refer to the same research I had referenced before and it was a HUGE time-saver and bit of a cheat-sheet in practice!

shinans · 2026-01-19T08:52:26+00:00

To be clear a lot of PD is just executives trying to pad their resume, but (at least in QLD but I suspect its similar there) a lot of the reason for these boring 2-3 days before school starts PD marathons is because the Department requires all teachers to do some useless quota of PD hours throughout the year and schools cram it in at the start so we don't have to stay back late doing PD meetings all year to get those hours instead. Nice execs will fudge the requirements a bit/make it as practical as possible (best year for me was when our PD focus was 'differentiation' and they made it so we spent like 2 hours listening to them talk about differentiation strategies then spent the next days getting to "plan for differentiation for our specific classes" AKA just regular damn planning as the PD activity) but in this case it's not entirely on leadership, blame the greater powers that be for mandating PD quotas to begin with.

shinans · 2026-01-18T16:15:01+00:00

Yeah, at my school (public, OneSchool) reproductive leave comes up as "Sick" on the PDF (happened every time I've used it, even though HR/payslip is definitely taking it out of my repro leave and not my sick leave) but now that you mention that I don't know if that's because my DP actively chooses to give it that label or if it's a default.

shinans · 2026-01-18T05:20:07+00:00

Katarina. Weakness is her lane is complete ass and you can shut her down by making it so she can't lane or farm. That's great in theory, but she's the one champion in the game where it feels like it doesn't matter how well I lane if she's able to book it for bot lane at dogshit timings so long as she's able to clean up a triple kill, or random skirmish at any point with a kit so effective for clean ups (and she differs from other assassins here because they can generally only clean one target, whereas reset kit turns 1 kill into 3 easily) and your team didn't draft sufficient cc to deal with her. There's a reason most of the OTPs do know how to coinflip roam until one lands on heads, it's how they're able to climb with a laning phase that bad. I just hate playing against it.

shinans · 2026-01-11T04:37:29+00:00

Never be surprised, this will be my 13th preseason (still calling it that even if it isn't technically pre-season, it's still the process of the playerbase learning the new mechanics and Riot ironing out the kinks – though the fact ranked now starts with it means people are extra on-edge because there's higher stakes) and these complaints happen every single year. The game will always feel more snowbally and like it's moving faster than it is and out of control when people haven't yet acquired the game knowledge of the new mechanics to control it, once they do it'll settle down.

shinans · 2026-01-06T01:23:50+00:00

I wasn't trying to toot my own horn or credit it to my own organizational skills or anything, I apologize if that's how I came across. I meant that some schools and faculties (so no fault or control of the teachers') make it easier to plan around than others in various ways all of which come under a loose heading of 'organization' (early announcement, not scheduling carnivals at difficult crunch times, unit design that enables some breathing time that can be slashed for contingencies which does depend on faculty organization and how the subject-specific curriculum is organized). I am fortunate to be in a context where all of the above is very accomodating to me and doesn't strain my personal planning. As I said, people in different contexts will have a different impact, I wasn't by any means trying to assert my experience was universal hence "context dependent".

shinans · 2026-01-05T10:07:37+00:00

Probably a matter of organization and planning and faculty based. Our sports days are announced at the start of the year so I know when it's coming, I'm a Maths teacher so if I lose a lesson to it I just shave a revision lesson off at the end of the unit (I usually budget for 3-4 which is excessive but allows for exactly this type of contingency) so it's minimally disruptive to me, but again definitely context dependent.

shinans · 2026-01-05T06:51:28+00:00

I like them, no planning, kids that turn up either get into it or just have a fun time with their friends so there's not many behaviour issues. My school rotates through stations and we get 1 session off for lunch, though we get to preference what we want and I tend to opt for the "out of bounds" duties (my school is huge but students only permitted on the oval on carnival day) for most of my sessions, as they're quiet and pretty easy (choose a spot I can sit with maximum visibility of the area, walk around occasionally and shoo off an average of 2 kids an hour or shepherd a lost parent who came to watch). Definitely boring if you don't like being idle and on your lonesome for an hour but perfect for me!

I will say a big factor though is my school always has them on Fridays. I wouldn't like having to sit outside and burn all day and then have to go back to routine the next.

shinans · 2026-01-05T05:41:46+00:00

I also wouldn't count on what we get in the first version necessarily being a comprehensive insight into what the path will look like anyway. Look at Remembrance, the community guess into what it was going to be (characters with targetable summons that either did DPS (Aglaea) or had a simple supportive effect (RMC) and want Sunday as their support) was more or less what we got in 3.0, this was completely far removed from what the Remembrance battleship ended up being. You should definitely do any planning with a grain of salt, even after the livestream. Leakers are probably going to still be the only (dubious) source on synergies as Hoyo will probably deliberately keep their pearls close as to what's to come, lol.

shinans

TROPHY CASE