Foundation

The end of Term 1 is fast approaching, and we hope you are enjoying seeing the progress our Prep students have made during the past 9 weeks as much as we are!

A highlight from the past fortnight was the celebration of Harmony Day on Monday March 21st. Many of the Preps enjoyed the lunchtime soccer game (thank you Simon!) and it was wonderful seeing all the orange that was worn to celebrate inclusivity.

During our Integrated lessons, we have been learning about our school values of Responsibility, Resilience and Respect. From this, we have turned our focus to developing our understanding of the importance of respect regarding our First Nations People and their culture and history. Your child may wish to discuss what they have learnt about the Acknowledgement of Country, and we encourage you to foster these conversations at home!

We have of course continued our Phonics work through lots of hands-on activities and the singing of our chants. Please continue to practise the chants for Ss, Aa, Tt, Pp, Ii, Nn, Kk, Cc, and Ee, as well as the ones below, which we will learn during the next two weeks.

Happy house, /h/, /h/, /h/

Rusty robot, /r/, /r/, /r/

Mummy on the moon, /m/, /m/, /m/

Ducks dive down, /d/, /d/, /d/

With so many letters covered, it is a great time to help your child practise segmenting and blending sounds together at home. Focus on consonant-vowel-consonant words (eg. hat, mat, pig, cup etc.) Have you child voice each sound and then put them together to read the word. Similarly, have students attempt to hear each sound in a word and then write it themselves!

Finally, just a friendly reminder to please ensure your child comes to school with a full water bottle and their hat! Thank you!

Grade 1

We had a lazy morning enjoying the sunshine and watching the clouds.

We thought the children were imagining things, they could see animals and people in the sky. We were very concerned until the teachers looked up too. The children were right! They could see different shapes in the clouds. They had so much fun talking and squealing about what they could see.

The children were very grateful that their parents remembered to send their photos. They enjoyed observing their development from birth to the present and did a great job completing their own timeline. Thank you for assisting them with their mini presentations.

The wonderful children have been working extremely hard at working on their individual goals and we celebrate their achievements regularly by displaying them on our ‘WOW WALL’.

Anyway, we have a ‘WOW’ time all the time.

Thank you from the Grade 1 Team

Hannah, Daniel, Helen, Verity, Luciana

Grade 2

Grade 2 – Fun Writing Letter Recounts

In our classroom we have been writing recounts but then adding some familiar opening and closing to make it more interesting and turn our recounts into letters. Our letter recounts were about Twilight Sports and the very entertaining evening we all had and enjoyed.

This week you can read some of our letter recounts in this newsletter. This weekend, try to be creative like us, get your Harmony Week recount ready and turn it into an exciting letter to someone you choose to write to.

Have a go, it’s a lot of fun!

Grade 3/4

Non-Campers Fun Activities

Tent building

On Thursday March 2022, we worked on building camping tents! First we sorted ourselves into two groups. We got out the tents from their bags and organised the ground sheet, poles and pegs. Our goal was to build well structured tents… this proved very challenging with no instructions! It was such a warm day that we were tiring quickly. Luckily with the help of Verity and Mrs Dunn, we were successful in putting up the tents. All the children enjoyed going into the tents and pretending to be campers. When we tried to get the pegs to hold the tent down, we found the ground super hard, as there hadn’t been much rain! Coco and I went to ask Andrew for a hammer, and once we obtained the right tools, the job became much more fun!

Damper recount

On Friday 18 March 2022, we went to wash our hands and walked quietly into the staff room. We were looking forward to doing something a little different to our usual reading and writing lessons! As we were the students that didn’t attend camp this year, we experienced some unusual lessons!

As we made damper we took turns and had fun mixing and measuring with the measuring cups and spoons. All of the kids had so much fun, lots of the kids liked the dough texture. Once the damper dough was made, we waited patiently for the delicious bread to cook. Luckily, just as we were sitting down to our lunch, Semiha appeared with the warm rolls and we got to eat them warm and crispy!

It was such an easy recipe for us to make that I thought it would be fun for families to try at home!

Enjoy

By Evie Wann

Grade 3/4C

Damper recipe

Ingredients: Tools:

3 cups of flour (self raising) large bowl

½ tsp sault butter knife

½ cup of milk spoon (large suggested)

½ cup of water measuring tools (cups)

3 tbsp of butter

Preheat oven to 200c

Method:

Firstly put flour and salt into the large bowl.

Add butter and rub in hands until no lumps of butter are left.

Make a well with a spoon and lightly the milk and water.

Mix with a knife till all the batter is in a doe shape. Knead with hands until doe counsesonsy you could put it on a tray or shape and design

Or cut up and share.

Cook for 15 to 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Grade 5/6

LITERACY

In reading this term we have been writing letters to our teacher about the book we are reading. We are summarising what the book is about as well as discussing the things we like or dislike about it. We have also had lessons about different book genres, such as historical fiction, realistic fiction, non fiction, sci fi, and fantasy fiction.

We learnt quite a bit about writing in our class. First we learnt the incredibly vital format of writing: planning, draft writing, editing, and publishing. We also learnt that description is key. Additionally, grammar, dialogues, language, words that are descriptive and making sure that the reader can identify what you are writing about are crucial. When writing, the organisation of the story is very important. We learnt how we can describe the characters movements and feelings. We learnt that we can describe a story using metaphors and similes. We also learnt that we have to know what genre we are writing about.

MATHS

In mathematics we have learnt about triangular and square numbers, prime and composite numbers, patterns in numbers, ordering numbers on a number line and numbers in expanded form and notation. Our recent focus has been decimal numbers and learning their place value. We have been completing different tasks to help with our learning, including lots of fun games!!

PROJECT BASED LEARNING

For our Island project, we have recently done mapping. There has been many great

maps people have completed and have many different things added to them like burning the edges and putting a wax cover on it. When I saw great ones it was paradise on the island of Cennet. Adaptations have been the focus of this week. Everyone has learnt about how animals and plants have to adapt to living in different conditions because of habitat loss and many other things that animals and plants have had to cope with.

To learn about bird adaptations, we did an experiment with different things such as tongs represented the spoonbill, water dropper represented honey eater, tweezers represented the Willie Wagtail, the chopsticks represented the White-faced Heron and finally the last one is the peg which represented the Cockatoo. They then had to pick up different objects that represented food and we were able to see the things that were easier than others. The water dropper for example was able to pick up water, but no other birds would be able to use their beak to do so.

MINDFULNESS

After lunch each day, we do approximately ten minutes of mindfulness. This is a great way for us to reset after running around at lunch. Sometimes it is breathing exercises or guided meditation. It helps us to get ready for the afternoon’s learning and to remember to use strategies to help us during other times of the day.

INCURSION TO MORELAND KINDERGARTEN!

Last week, a handful of our students had the opportunity to spend some time with the kids at Moreland Kindergarten.

Once everyone said hello and overcame some shyness, our students read aloud some picture story books. All the kinder kids loved being read to and our students showed patience and kindness, asking them questions and making sure they were comfortable.

Then, the kinder kids took our students into their beautiful new building to share some exploratory play time. It was so great seeing our big kids enjoy being little kids again! There was dressing up, drawing, lego, trucks, puzzles and a couple of our students who loved a cruise on the tricycles. A big thank you to Lucy and the educators at Moreland Kindergarten. We hope to create more activities in the future where our students can share experiences with our next door neighbours!

Merri-bek Mail

Issue 4 · 25 Mar 2022

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