Learning & Teaching

NUMERACY - Colleen Monaghan

I hope many of you have taken up the opportunity to join Matific. We have 50 days’ free trial, so you can enjoy the activities for the next 50 days. We will then assess this and the advantages for our students learning and make a decision on continuing on with it.

The competition practice tests start in May so watch out for those and have a go. Your child may love challenging themselves and getting instant feedback.

It is great seeing so many parents signed up for our Parent helper session, I look forward to working with you all. If you haven’t signed up yet, its not too late, just email myself 

cmonaghan@sfmoreland.catholic.edu.au or Di Manthos 

dmanthos@sfmorelnad.catholic.edu.au The two sessions are Wednesday 5th May  2:30pm-3:25pm or Thursday 6th May 8:45am-9:30am. 

The Foundation students investigated comparing the lengths of different worms using playdough. They knew to line the worms up next to each to see which was longer, shorter and in between. 

We also found out we could compare the lengths of our worms once we measured them. We used unifix blocks to find out how long they were. We counted how many blocks long they were and recorded it. We found out Tommy had the longest worm at 13 blocks long and the shortest worm made was 5 blocks long.

You could do more of these investigations at home. Can you find something long around your home? Now find something shorter than it? Can you find something in between these two objects? Is it longer, shorter? What makes you say that?  Can you find out how long it is by measuring it with things around the home? (pasta, blocks, lego pieces, pegs) 

This week in the junior grade we continued our investigation of shapes and we looked at shapes that can be made by joining other shapes. Here are examples of our findings.  We were able to describe the shapes and name them. 

The Middle students are exploring addition and we investigated strategies that make addition efficient., we knew compensation was great when either addends were close to a ten (9,19, 99, 8, 98 etc..)  We saw that near doubles were good too, when the addends were almost a double , like 23+24 or 35+34 ) Lots of students found using place value to split the numbers into their parts worked well too. 45+73= (40+70)+(5+3)= 118.

Here are some examples of our students strategies for adding.