What's happening in our learning spaces? 

FOUNDATION 

The excitement has continued in the Foundation area with many amazing opportunities to focus on learning new things!

Over the past two weeks, we have shared many of the texts that were nominated for prizes by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. A favourite story was “The Best Hiding Place” by Jane Godwin and Sylvia Morris. We made connections with the text by sharing the favourite places we all like to hide at our homes. Another story that was shared was “Market Day” by Carrie Gallasch. This book made us remember fun holidays by the beach or interstate, where there are always markets to wander through with our families. Many of us were reminded of visits to the Preston Market and Victoria Market and the yummy smells of cooking food and testing a variety of treats.

Last Thursday, we participated in our very first Book Week Parade at St. Fidelis. We are certainly becoming experts at parading in front of everyone. What an amazing assortment of costumes were present in our learning spaces! We meet princesses, superheroes, book characters such as Paddington Bear, a Llama with maracas, ninja turtles and of course Pete the Cat and his four groovy buttons presented by Mrs. Wenckcowski and Miss Alex! 

As inquirers, we were very fortunate to have a couple of guest speakers who shared their knowledge about the design process they use in their jobs. We are very thankful that Nina (Ruby’s mum from FLW)  and Laura (Isabel’s mum from FLW) were able to share their expertise with us. Their conversations linked very well with one of the understandings from our current Inquiry Unit, “There is a process to follow when designing”. The guest speakers have given us many ideas that we will investigate over the coming weeks, as we begin our own design challenges.

Work will commence shortly in the library area so we will not borrow any more books for the remainder of the term. Library bags will remain at school ready for Term 4 borrowing.

Have a wonderful week, 

Leanne Wenckowski & Alex Phillips

Foundation Team

YEAR 1/2

It has been yet another busy and exciting week in the Year 1/2 learning spaces! We have been engaging in so many fun and wonderful learning opportunities! 

As collaborators, we have spent lots of our time working together with our peers in groups to design a suitable birdhouse for our school garden. We have taken the time to ensure that we all do our fair share in our group by participating in different roles. The roles are Leader, Time Keeper,  Scribe and Stray. These roles enabled each of us to communicate in an effective way. The leader ensured that we were all taking turns to share our ideas. The scribe added the ideas that we had agreed on, to our design. The timekeeper made sure that we used our time effectively and the stray went around to source ideas from other groups. When our design was complete we had the opportunity to discuss how we might improve the design. We used yellow tracing paper to refine our initial ideas and develop our final design. This week we are beginning to use a variety of materials to build our prototypes! We are looking forward to this!

Over the last week, we have listened to lots of picture story books. As thinkers, we have been learning to use our prior knowledge, characters and events to identify the theme of the story. To extend our thinking we have been making connections between the text and our own life experiences.  We were very excited to celebrate our favourite book characters for Book Week on Thursday! As creative thinkers, we had time to design our very own book cover for our favourite story. We made sure to add all of the features of a fiction book cover such as the title, author, illustrator and a detailed picture. We were very determined to make it our best as they were placed in a competition! Congratulations to all of our winners. 

   Check out some of our costumes below!

1/2 Team, 

Alycia Marsico, Vania Sparano and Vicky Karalis. 

YEAR 3/4

What another amazing week! And only three weeks to go!

Last week we engaged in learning about Anti-Bullying. The National Bullying Prevention Week will serve as an important platform to raise awareness of bullying and its impact on individuals and communities. We dressed up as SUPERHIROS to support this great cause. The Year 3-6 students engaged in a webinar on how to be an eSafe kid. 

We were very lucky to have Year 9 students from Lyneham High Band perform for the whole school on Monday afternoon. They played some great songs and we sang along too! Thanks, Year 9s!

The theme this year for Book Week was READ, GROW, INSPIRE. We had an amazing day celebrating all of the wonderful books we enjoy reading. We dressed up as our favourite characters and paraded around the hall. We explored some books from the Children's Book Week resources, including Jigsaw by Bob Graham, Frank’s Red Hat by Sean E. Avery and Our Dreaming by Kirli Saunders. This is where we were able to explore many different learning opportunities in relation to each of these books. We also explored the theme and genre of each of these books.

A reminder that home learning will be sent home this week. Children will be given a hand out and note for their Matific Learning (they have been using this program during class time, so they should be familiar with it). If you need any links or misplace the Home Learning Sheet, this is all available on your child's Google classroom.

3/4BZ will be running an assembly on Friday 1st of September, We would love to see you there!

Year 3/4 Teachers

Belinda Panzarino & Bianka Zorzut

YEAR 5/6 

In the SLA, students are hard at work on their inquiry into making movies.  They are showing great creativity and enthusiasm and the early rushes look quite promising. In the coming weeks, the students will be completing their movies and will start on the promotion and advertising aspects through literacy.  

Bookkeeping was very successful in the SLA with students dressing up as characters from books they enjoy. The theme of Matilda which is being read in class was also successful.  

In maths, students continue to explore geometry through the creation of 3D nets and finding the volume of 3D objects.

Footsteps continues this term, this time the focus being on drama, which links well to the inquiry unit. 

This Friday will see a number of Year 5 and 6 students competing in the bat tennis finals and we wish them luck.