PLT News
Year One.
Welcome to Term Two. We are nearly half way through the term and we still have so much to do. Where is the time going?
Everyone in Year One hopes all the special women in your families had a terrific Mother’s Day. It was lovely to see so many families enjoying the sunshine for our Mother’s Day picnic on Friday. It was so nice to see families back within our school after such a trying year in 2020. Thank you for visiting us. Our Year One children enjoyed making their gifts. There was so much excitement and laughter as they worked together to make their photo frames and book marks.
This term we have been looking at “Our Place in the World” for our inquiry unit in Geography. Our community is an important focus in this unit. Our emotions and responses to the events in our lives are a continued focus. We have been learning how to make better choices and follow the three R’s – respect, responsibility and resilience - in all aspects of our lives, whether at school, home or in the community.
Reading, writing and spelling continue to have a daily focus. In Reading we have been learning different reading strategies to help improve our skills. Predicting the outcome of events in texts, sequencing events into order and understanding what we are reading have been important focus areas. It is important all children read each night at home to further develop the skills we have been working on at school. Please remember to fill in your diaries each day and bring them to school.
In Writing, this week we have just begun our work on Narratives, learning about the different elements needed for this genre of writing. Who does not like a good fairy tale or story? Children will be learning about describing settings, characters and writing about problems and finding solutions to these problems.
In Spelling we have begun working in groups. Children have been placed in groups to help develop the skills they need to improve their spelling, which will also help their reading and writing skills. Please remind your children to keep reading and writing their Magic words to help improve word recognition skills.
Year 5/6
We have had an exciting and busy start to Term 2 in the Senior School. Students have been excited to begin our new inquiry unit on Geography. We have been learning about the impact of floods and bushfires on the local community, and where they have occurred in Australia. Students were able to connect their learning to the recent NSW and QLD floods, as well as the 2020 Victorian and NSW bushfires.
For the past 4 weeks, our writing focus has been on getting creative with narrative writing! Our students have thoroughly enjoyed learning about the structure and language features of narrative writing, such as the orientation, complication, series events, resolution, time connectives and descriptive language. Students have been able to successfully follow the writing process to plan, draft, revise, edit and publish their narrative pieces.
In Reading we have been building our knowledge about a range of topics by connecting print and images in a text as well as finding the main idea. Our students are able to find the main idea of fiction and non-fiction texts. They can even explain what the main idea of each paragraph is!
We have been building on our multiplication knowledge by learning about factors and multiples. Factors are what we can multiply to get a number and multiples are what we get after multiplying a number. We have been trialling different methods of finding factors by using hundred grids, division and factor trees.
This week, our Year 5 students completed NAPLAN. On Tuesday the 11th of May, students completed the language conventions and writing assessments. On Wednesday, they completed reading and finally on Thursday they sat a Maths assessment. All students did a fantastic job and should be incredibly proud of their achievements.
We would like to thank our parents and carers for your ongoing support.