Cumberland

Ms Karen McArdle

Buddy Bench

The Cumberland students now have a ‘Buddy Bench’ installed. The bench is a place where students can sit to signify they need a buddy for the day. Often students cannot find where their friends have gone, have their best friend absent that day or want to expand their friendship circle and make new friends. This bench will be one opportunity to help these issues.

Earn and Learn Sports Equipment

A very big thank you goes to all of the families that collected the Earn and Learn stickers for our school. Fairview and Cumberland received three huge boxes of sports equipment. With your stickers, we were able to purchase:

18 x small AFL balls
5 x size 3 Soccer balls
17 x size 4 Soccer Balls
17 x size 5 Soccer balls
144 x Tennis balls
17 x mesh bags
2 x hand pumps and needles
4 x portable soccer nets

Each class received a mesh bag full of sports gear. That very day, Fairview and Cumberland students were out at lunchtime playing with the gear, with balls going everywhere!

Once again, thank you to the families that collected the stickers. You now know all of your efforts were very much appreciated.

Stop Saying “You are Smart”, instead praise effort and hard work

Researchers, Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller undertook a landmark series of experiments with American 5th graders where they looked at how these students behaved with the type of praise they received. They found students behaved very differently.

In summary, they found:

Students who were praised for their intelligence:

tended to avoid challenges, preferring easier tasks
were more interested in their competitive standing (how they measured against other students) than in learning how to improve
were more likely to give up after a failure
were more likely to perform poorly after a failure
were more likely to misrepresent how well they did on a task
were more likely to view their failures as evidence of low intelligence
Students who were praised for their effort showed the opposite trend. They:

preferred tasks that were more challenging – tasks they could learn from
were more interested in learning new strategies for success than finding out how others performed

Mueller CM and Dweck CS. 1998. Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance. Journal for Personality and Social Psychology 75(1): 33-52

Year 5 Planetary Expo

The Year 5 students proudly presented their work to their parents and invited guests on Thursday at their first Science Expo. Throughout last term, the students researched two planets of their choosing to find information under key areas e.g. atmosphere, structure…. Once the information was found, they then used a graphic organiser to make comparisons for the various key areas. Using the comparisons, they then wrote a report using the comparative sentence patterns covered in class. The students worked very hard on this assignment and were excited to present it. All visitors expressed admiration for the work the students had done and the way in which it had been presented using the Book Creator App. Congratulations Year 5!