Curriculum News

Harmony Day Celebrations

We recognised Harmony Day last week by celebrating the message "Everybody Belongs!" This annual celebration encourages inclusiveness, respect and belonging for all Australians regardless of their cultural background.  To celebrate our diverse and culturally rich community, a variety of learning experiences were organised. Students were engaged in a number of learning tasks including creating and learning about  the flags of different countries. Everyone was  encouraged to dress in traditional Cultural Dress or wear  orange - the theme colour of Harmony Day, on Friday 25th.  It was great to see that many students took advantage of the opportunity to have a t-shirt tie-dyed orange. Whilst we were unable to bring classes together to hold our assembly, we had an online assembly which provided classes with the opportunity to share their learning.   

Many of the students also enjoyed a special lunch including a wrap and juice box.  A big thank you to Franco's Fruit and Vegetables and Woolworths Cumberland Park for donated items and vouchers towards this lunch! 

Each class also made different flags to represent the various countries within our school and strips of orange material containing kind messages were placed at the front gate. 

Combined Choir Rehearsal

Various students involved in the Festival of Music choir went to Woodcroft Primary School on Wednesday March 23rd for a very special combined schools rehearsal.

We were joined by students from other local schools to get a taste of what it is like singing with a large number of students.

Although we have a relatively small choir compared to some of the other schools, what we lack in numbers we make up for with drive, passion and commitment.  The group proved they are more than capable of independent rehearsals, which was evident in the way they sang in unison for the entire bus trip to and from the rehearsal.

We received great feedback from the choir conductor about how Clovelly Park students engaged during the rehearsal.  We also received some excellent feedback from the bus driver when he dropped us back at Clovelly Park, who said he would rather listen to the group sing than listen to the radio!  So well done to all the choir students and a big thank you to Ms. Fudge who joined us on our trip to Woodcroft. 

Performing Arts Classes

We have had a great start to the year in Performing Arts with lots of dancing, singing, playing music and some dramatic play too.  Over the last few weeks students have been looking at how to manipulate their voices to create different sounds. We have explored how pitch, tone and speed all contribute to expressing emotion.  We then used puppets and applied these voice techniques to create short performances and videos.

All classes were given the opportunity to work in groups to and create their own arrangement of “Yellow Submarine” by The Beatles.  Using a combination of percussive and melodic instruments, students rehearsed and performed their own arrangements demonstrating how incredibly creative they are!

Learning in R1 

Each morning we start our day with Literacy tasks. As we are all at different places in our learning journey, not everyone is doing the same thing at the same time.

These students are looking at a picture. Saying the word aloud, blending the sounds back together to make the word, tapping out the sounds they hear (decoding the word) then mapping (writing or encoding) the word, eg. t-r-u-ck.

These two students are both completing writing activities. One is working on narrative writing (imaginative text) and the other is consolidating their knowledge in sentence writing - editing for nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions and punctuation.

These students are learning to use a dictionary for spelling. They are discovering the meaning of words so they can be used in context in a sentence. Working in pairs encourages conversations about learning as well as building skills about working together and getting along with others.

These students are orally manipulating sounds (saying them aloud) to listen for the syllables in a word. They then need to place it in the correct pile of words with one, two, three or four syllables. Building skills in recognising word patterns and sounds can help when decoding for reading. 

In Science, R1 students have been learning about Forces. They have explored push, pull, gravity and air resistance. Students have been exploring forces in nature, on the playground and in the classroom. They used design and technology to build toys, using wheels and other components to show movement with a push, pull or both.                                         

 Students also made paper helicopters to understand how the air pushes up on the helicopter as it falls. We learnt that the air pushes on the wings of the helicopter to make it spin. 

Self portraits in G4

In G4 we have been looking at identity and our personal strengths.  We learnt about different artists and how they depicted themselves in their portraits. One artist we focused on was Pablo Picasso and we did our own Picasso inspired portraits.