From the Classroom

News from 5/6

We can’t believe how quickly this term is flying by—there’s so much happening in the 5/6 unit! Last week, we had a wonderful time visiting Scienceworks, where students explored a range of fascinating exhibits and attended a live, presenter-led show in the Planetarium. During the show, they learned about the crucial role that water plays for life here on Earth, the diverse environments of planets, moons, and dwarf planets in our solar system, and some of the space missions that have taken place.

This week, students began a stellar new project for Inquiry. Working in pairs, they’ve begun researching a planet and gathering information on who discovered it, whether it has been explored, how it got its name, and any mysteries surrounding it. We’re excited to learn lots of out-of-this-world information!

In English, students are thoroughly enjoying their class novel, Once, which tells the story of a young boy named Felix who tries to stay brave and hopeful while facing the challenges of World War II. It’s given us a great opportunity to discuss historical events and explore the concept of narrative voice. Our class discussions have been full of insight as students delve into Felix’s thoughts and behaviours, deepening their understanding of his character and how he navigates difficult situations.

In Maths, we’ve been focusing on volume and capacity, using a mix of hands-on activities, creative tasks, and worded problems to help students grasp these concepts. We’re also continuing to refine our skills in solving and writing number sentences, with a focus on applying the order of operations. These sentences incorporate a mix of whole numbers, fractions, and decimals.

What's happening in 3/4

We have had such fun in 3/4 the last few weeks! We loved how everyone immersed themselves in the activities of Book Week, both in the school-wide shared reading sessions and the Book Week parade. The magic of reading was truly felt by everyone who was dancing and singing along in the festivities.

We have an exciting conclusion to our English unit at the end of the term, with an excursion to Hoyts to see our class novel 'The Wild Robot' on the big screen! We have also been diving deep into our knowledge of persuasive writing, where students have written appeals to save the rainforest from the perspective of an animal. We have loved seeing the students get creative and persuasive in their writing. Look out parents, with persuasive skills like these, your kids may be a lot more convincing next time they need to ask you for something!

In numeracy we have moved onto financial maths, which has captivated the interest of our students! To further enhance our students calculating skills, we encourage you to involve your kids in your weekly shop, adding up the price of ingredients bought and encouraging them to calculate the change expected. Our 3/4s have also been building their knowledge of shapes and their features. We loved sending them on a 3D shape hunt across the school, where they found a range of objects and structures that represented 3D shapes.

We are getting to the pointy end of our Inquiry unit, where students are working hard to finalise the key elements of their islands, create brochures, flags, persuasive advertisements and build dioramas. As we mentioned on COMPASS, we would love for students to bring in a box (shoebox size) for them to create their island dioramas. Some students have been eager to create some elements for their diorama at home (such as plants, animals, vegetation, etc) which we are happy for them to do and add to their creations in our inquiry sessions. We will be hosting a 'Travel Expo' in the last week of school for the students to showcase all of their inquiry learning this term. If you can make it along on Thursday the 19th of September at 3pm, we would love to see you there!

News in 1/2s

Can you believe we are nearing the end of Term 3?! The students have been working very hard across all areas of their learning.

Students have used their learnt knowledge from our persuasive unit and applied these skills when writing a persuasive piece on their chosen sustainability topic. Topics covered were composting, recycling, picking up rubbish, cleaning our oceans, protecting animals and many more. They were able to think of 3 convincing reasons to support their opinion.

This week, students are using images and words to create a poster advertising a sustainability topic.

In Maths, students are busy learning how to tell the time on an analogue clock. We have covered o'clock, half past and quarter hour times. They have enjoyed the hands on aspect, using clocks to physically show different times and have persevered when drawing hands on clocks themselves. Students have also been learning about mass. They had fun comparing objects around the classroom and classifying them as heavier or lighter.

Our 'Sustainability Superstars' are busy designing their own arcade theme game in our cardboard challenge. Focusing on the topic of reusing, students will reuse cardboard boxes to create their game and have a chance to play each others. We can't wait to see their marvellous creations!

Fantastic Foundations

The last few weeks have been very exciting for Foundation.

In Maths, the students have been exploring the concepts of division and sharing, and grasping the concept quickly, with fun activities such as sharing apples with apple trees, spikes with echidnas and lollies with friends.

Over the last two weeks we have been observing the life cycle of our dwarf beans. Foundation were lucky enough to bring these home from our farm excursion where we have had the opportunity to record these in our plant diaries.

We will take these home at the end of the term, ready for their new home.

The students have been able to check in daily with their emotions and feelings through our 'zone of regulation' check in. Each day students are encouraged to check in with each other and themselves and to support one another with tools and strategies we have been learning over the last few weeks.