Luna Community Report 

November 2023 Luna Newsletter

Dear parents

Welcome to the November Newsletter and almost an end of term 4 and ..... almost the end of the school year. As we step into the last few weeks of the last term of the year, we'd like to remind you of a few important things:

Sun Safety: Please remember that students require hats for outdoor play to stay safe in the sun.

Stay Hydrated: Ensure that your child brings their water bottle to school to stay hydrated throughout the day.

Reader Bag: Students must bring their reader bag to school every day to continue their reading journey.

In the Luna community we have been exploring a variety of topics.

Reading 

In reading we explored biographies and autobiographies. The biographies we explored offered captivating insights into the lives of notable individuals, whether they're historical figures, celebrities, leaders, or everyday people with compelling stories. Some biographies we used in our reading lessons are: Greta Thunberg, a young girl fighting for a better environment, a book called Emmanuel's Dream and it was about a boy who was born with a one good leg and learned to ride a bike, who then pedalled nearly 170 km in just 10 days. We also read about Evonne Goolagong Cawley, who was the first Australian woman from an Aboriginal family to play tennis at Wimbledon. Finally we learned about a famous song writer and singer, Taylor Swift. 

Throughout the reading lessons the students used reading strategies like: Locating key information, predicting, questioning, making connections, summarising, comparing and contrasting and criticising.

In independent reading students were practising buddy reading. 

Writing

In Writing, we have been using our reading knowledge to create biographies of other people and also, wrote our autobiographies. The students focused on using the features of biographies, the structure and learned about simple and compound sentences. 

Here are some samples of the work the students produced:

Maths

In Maths the students learned about fractions and then we moved on the mass and capacity. In fractions they learned about halves, quarters and eights, were able to explain what is a fraction and to explain how they know what is half.  In mass and capacity, students explored mass by using informal units to measure the weight of objects, explained which objects have more mass than others, and which objects have the same mass. In capacity, they explored the volume and capacity terminologies, and used materials to show how much a container or a space can hold and showed understanding of  what was the volume of these containers.

Here is some their work: 

Inquiry and SEL

Students were learning about different cultures and their celebrations. Some celebrations that students familiarised themselves with, were: Diwali, Eid, Ramadan, Christmas and Easter. Then we learned about the First Nations culture and learned about dreamtime stories of creation and the art that the First Peoples created. The students had an attempt to create art that was inspired by these creations. We read some dreamtime stories that also taught students about the way First Nations live in Australia.

Students used Social and Emotional Strategies to solve social in-school problems related to violence.  They also discussed what respect is, and how they can show it to their classmates, teachers and the wider community.