Learning and Teaching

Local History

Mrs Hodgetts

It has been rewarding to hear the students share their newly aquired historical knowledge as I walk through the classrooms of St Mary's. Whether it be learning about the explorers who bumped into this land or the reasons people migrated to Australia in the 1800's - even discovering that telephones used to be plugged into a wall!!!

As you would have seen on Seesaw, the current House Competition is a little different from ones we have organised in the past. It requires a willingness to complete some research on local history outside of school. Given the challenging element of this task, we encourage parents to work alongside your child to help them complete it - this is absolutely permitted. The value is in the learning about our local Ascot Vale History. 

Entries close Thursday. 

English 'Around the Grounds' with Ms Cardillo

SPELLING UPDATE

We are still working hard at learning about best practices in Spelling and teaching our new programs.  It has been a wonderful journey so far and we are happy to see students and teachers engaging in Little Learners Love Literacy and Word Origins consistently across the school

Here is a snippet of some of the authentic work happening in student books in Word Origins - Reading some of the sentences you will see that Word Origins is not only improving our knowledge in spelling and morphology but also our word choices when writing sentences! This is part of our daily routine, as is weekly dictations.

SPOTLIGHT ON YEAR THREE PERSPECTIVE WRITING

Year Three have been looking at Australian Celebrations and Commemorations through our Knowledge Building English unit.  As part of our learning about National Sorry Day we needed to dive into what it was that we were saying sorry for!

Students did some nonfiction reading about the Stolen Generation and then read the Picture book Sorry Day by Coral Vass.  (See Below)

From that students were able to engage in a creative writing session where the focus was on PERSPECTIVE.  Students wrote from the perspective of a child being stolen from their families.  There was also a teaching focus on using various sentence starters.

Here are some samples of their work.