A Spotlight on Learning
A Spotlight on Learning in the MLC on Heights Campus
What a wonderful start to the year for our MLC students! Everyone is working hard to learn our whole school routines such as Safety Lines, Teaching Lines, Turn and Talk and Whole Body Listening.
Our big focus for Term 1 has been getting ready for Naplan. In Grade 3, the students completed the Writing task on paper. (Grade 5s did their writing on laptops) This year in Naplan, it was a narrative story, which the teachers and students were all very happy with as students got to use their imagination to come up with characters, a setting and work out a problem that could happen and then ways to solve that problem. Then the Reading, Conventions of Language and Numeracy tests were on the I-Pads. All students did such a great job staying focused during each test and tried their very best – the teachers are all very proud!
In Social and Emotional Learning we have been working through our school values of Respect, Collaboration and Resilience (we will look at Excellence in a couple more weeks). When students demonstrate our school values they have been receiving tokens to put on their personalised token charts- this is part of our School Wide Positive Behaviour System (SWPBS). We tapped into our student voice and came up with some prizes that go on our Rewards Menu. When students collect ten (10) tokens they can exchange their tokens for a smaller type reward. When they get another ten (10) totalling twenty (20) tokens they can claim a larger reward from our selected menu! When a students receives a token, the teacher will explain why they have been given that token…. Eg. "You demonstrated resilience because you bounced back when you didn’t win the game!"
Please ask your child to tell you about our school values and how many tokens they have!!
In Maths, the MLC students have been working on their counting goals and learning about Place Value. By the end of Grade 3 we want our students to be able to work with numbers in the millions (eg. 2 348 193) and by the end of Grade 4 they could be working with decimal fraction numbers (eg. 8.3 or 3.97). It is exciting to hear students using place value language when working in the classroom. We have been using Think Boards to learn more about comparing and ordering numbers, more or less, number lines, renaming and much more. You can even play a fun game at home called ‘Guess My Number’ One person has a number stuck to their back and they have to ask their partner different questions to work out that number.
For example: you could ask… "Is the number in the hundreds column more than 5? Is the ones number odd or even? Is there a 6 in the tens column?"
For Writing we are starting to develop our Grammar and Punctuation skills. Students have been creating sentences and identifying the adjectives, nouns and verbs. They have also been identifying which sentences need a comma, full stop, question mark or exclamation mark! While students have been writing their sentences they are also working on developing their handwriting skills by using the dotted thirds and correct letter formation and size. We have been building their skills to demonstrate high quality book work as well by using red pencil and grey lead, writing the date and using a ruler to rule their page.
Finally, in Projects, we have started learning about water in our world and how the Water Cycle works. We are excited to do more learning about this over the next few weeks. The Harmony Day Parade is coming up on Wednesday 25th March, so we have been reading books all about different cultures and learning about each other and what countries we come from. We are super excited to complete our Harmony Tree display which shows that: “just like the branches of a tree grow in different directions, our backgrounds are different, but we are all connected.” We invite and welcome our families to come into our MLC building to see our displays for Harmony Day.
Mrs Suzanne Stubbings
Learning Centre Leader
(Heights Campus)