i-Hour

At Infant Jesus School, we believe that we should provide challenging and highly motivating learning opportunities for all of our students, catering for all ability levels, capacity and creative talents. We want our students to be creating solutions and to be critiquing, analysing and evaluating problems. We want our students to recognise needs or opportunities, not just in our school or community, but globally to identify and create solutions. We want our students to be challenged and to develop the skills required in a contemporary educational setting.

In order to provide our students with these rich learning opportunities, a new initiative, iHour was introduced into our teaching and learning program at the start of 2017, as staff strive to become a Leading Learning School.

In line with the Australian Curriculum, iHour aims to develop the knowledge, understanding and skills to ensure that students:

• investigate, design, plan and create solutions
• are creative, innovative and enterprising
• engage confidently with and responsibly select appropriate technologies when designing solutions

In the iHour program, every student in Years Four to Year Six are given the opportunity over the course of the year to participate in an intensive five-week learning block where they leave class to participate in a 100-minute iHour session every week. These sessions will focus on the use of design and computational thinking to help generate and produce solutions for authentic needs.

At Infant Jesus School, we Expect Great Things and therefore, to participate in this program, it is important we ensure students understand that involvement in iHour is based on their consistent hard work and positive attitude in class.