What's happening in our learning spaces? 

Students of the Week

Foundation

This week in Foundation, there was a lot of excitement as the countdown to on-site learning began. As reflective thinkers, we shared how we were feeling about returning to school and had time and opportunity to ask questions and discuss anything we were worried about. We have enjoyed our online sessions each day as we connected with each other, shared our thinking and made lots of new discoveries. 

We have come so far, and our ability to be confident, courageous, curious, persistent and respectful learners, communicators, collaborators, researchers, thinkers and self-managers is something to celebrate and be proud of, and we will continue to display these skills and assets in the learning space. 

As mathematicians, we continued to find out about Money. As thinkers, we applied our knowledge and understanding of Australian coins, as we engaged in play in our own shops at home. We also made different values using the coins, and engaged in shopping during our online meets, where we visited a cafe, a bakery and the supermarket and paid for our purchases. We even made different amounts and put them into our very own little piggy banks. 

As writers, we continued to write about our experiences at home. Some of us wrote stories titled ‘Guess What Happened Today’, where we applied our knowledge of Narratives. We made sure to include a problem and a solution. As thinkers, we also included capital letters, spaces, sight words and full stops, and recorded known sounds, blends and digraphs. 

At the end of the week, we enjoyed some Fun Friday tasks with our families. Some of us built forts, whilst some of us watched our favourite YouTube channel, Art Hub For Kids, and engaged in directed drawing. We made paper planes, cards, lego creations, origami, and engaged in cooking. 

We look forward to seeing everyone on-site this week as we reconnect with each other. It is great to be back, seeing everyone's smiling faces and sharing our remote learning experiences. 

Foundation Team, Leanne Wenckowski and Alycia Marsico. 

Year 1/2

We have settled into Remote Learning for our last term of the year! We continue to build our resilience and support each other as we navigate through our learning. As e-learners we are confident in sharing our learning with our peers using technology. We have come a long way!

As readers, we are exploring different types of texts about nature and our environment. We have researched about rainforests, how plants and flowers grow, how to make herb gardens and what leaf litter is. 

As inquirers, we are investigating the different types of gardens, such as water, dessert and flower gardens. We have noticed that these gardens have similarities and differences. This week we chose two gardens to compare and contrast. Later in the week we created our own dream garden. As thinkers, we needed to visualise what we wanted our gardens to look like. We thought about where flowers, trees and plants were placed and what other unique features our gardens could have. Take a look at some of our dream gardens!

As mathematicians, we are continuing to explore Multiplication. This week we focused on creating an Array City using our multiplication knowledge of arrays, groups of and number sentences. Have a look at our beautiful cities!

On Friday the Year 1/2s engaged in an online virtual incursion on Cyber Safety. We learnt three important things from the incursion… 

1. Talk to a trusted adult

2. Keep all personal details private

3. Have a balance between screen time and green time (playing outside, playing with board games and toys, playing sport, dancing and building a blanket fort)

We also spent our Friday afternoon engaging in Mindfulness activities. Take a look!

We are looking forward to another week of engaging learning and welcoming the Year 1/2s onsite on Thursday and Friday!

Year 1/2 Team

Belinda Filippone, Stefanie Carriera and Maria Delaney

Year 3/4

Hopefully this is our last week of full time lockdown as we head into increased freedoms.  As we know more from the changing landscape we will keep you informed.  

This week we are continuing on with poetry and the use of figurative language such as simile, metaphor and hyperbole. Our Inquiry is based on the use of spaces available to us with particular reference to school space. We are looking at the process, purpose and thinking behind the design of spaces being used. We encourage you to walk/ride with your children to look at the way space has been utilised at the new elevated railway station at Coburg. You might discuss the way this could have been done in terms of consultation with the community and who they think is being catered for in the use of the space. 

In Maths, we are looking at the use of calendars to organise time and reading and interpreting timetables.

We are looking forward to the return of students to the classroom. Keep an eye on the SkoolBag App for updates on how the return will be organised.

Year 5/6

Year 5/6

This week the Grade 5/6 students will hopefully complete their last full week of online learning and begin the transition back to full time onsite learning.  The excitement in returning to the classroom after a long and challenging time online is building.  Even though this remote learning hasn’t been ideal for all learners, the 5/6 teachers are so proud of the positivity, enthusiasm and positive growth mindset that the students continue to exude. We are optimistic and looking forward to welcoming the students back to the classroom safely.  We once again take this opportunity to thank our hardworking parents for their continued support and understanding. 

Reading and Writing

Students continued exploring persuasive techniques used in advertisements to persuade an audience. They discussed and identified various persuasive techniques such as appeals to common sense, fairness, family values, justice and patriotism. Other persuasive techniques include using evidence, statistics, expert opinions, research findings, and even attacks on opposing views. Using humour or puns were also a valuable and successful technique explored. Rhetorical questions, cause and effect, generalisations, colloquial language, and repetition can be particularly persuasive.  Students constructed persuasive texts to their teachers about iPad purchases and end of school class parties with success. 

We are also continuing to listen/read our whole class text “The 39 Clues”. This week the main characters, Amy and Dan, survived a bomb explosion, sabotage by other teams and defied orders by human services to return to their horrid Aunt Beatrice's care. They convinced their rather unsuspecting au pair, Nellie, to agree to chaperone them. Students impersonated Nellie and her thought processes and feelings by creating a diary entry from Nellie's point of view as she was enroute to the next clue’s destination: Paris. 

Numeracy

In Numeracy, the students have started their unit on financial mathematics - exploring budgets, costs, profit and loss. We explored 3D shapes further by constructing 3D shapes from their 2D nets.  Students realised that 3D shapes could have a variety of nets.  Constructing a mobile of their 3D shapes they further cemented their understanding by labelling the shape with their technical names, including prisms and pyramids.  They labeled the shape’s faces, vertices, edges and apex’s and 2D shape identification within these shapes. 

Religion

In Religion, student’s commenced their new unit “My mission and the Church.” Students have started to explore their current personal understandings of justice and commenced investigating the Church’s teachings on caring for the poor.  They related Matthew 28:16 - 20 Commissioning of the disciples and the Good Samaritan scripture to their own experiences of love and compassion to consider ways they can live and act with a concern for the poor.  This week they focused on Socktober - an organisation and initiative where students learn what life is like for children from Thailand, specifically those from slum areas in Bangkok, the bustling capital. They were asked to think about what it means to live their mission and explored how Sister Chalaad, at the Good Shepherd Sisters' Kindergarten, lives mission in her work and life.

We are exceptionally proud of how the students continue to persevere with remote learning.  They have displayed resilience and patience. We encourage all students to continue to focus on the positives in their lives, the wonderful blessing God has granted us and the hope of the freedoms to come.  We encourage all 5/6 students to continue to attend all meets over the final stages of remote learning and look forward to welcoming their smiling faces into the classroom next week. 

Take care of yourselves and your families, 

"Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him." Jeremiah 1

Cherrie Arnold, Michelle Casameto, Olivia Sargent, Viviana Clarke