CLASSROOM NEWS!
News from the Prep/1 Room!
This week we welcomed our new little learners for transition on Monday again. It was wonderful to see how quickly they settled in and played alongside the Prep/1s. Our class did a beautiful job showing kindness, helping them feel safe and excited about starting school.
Literacy & Writing
In Writing, Grade 1 students have been working on recounts, using transition words like first, then, after and before to keep their ideas in order and make their stories flow. Foundation students have been practising turning fragments into complete sentences and writing simple before/after sentences with matching pictures.
In spelling and word work, we’ve explored the ck rule (when to use ck after a short vowel), sorted words ending in c, k, and ck, and used these in our own sentences. Across the week we’ve continued with InitiaLit, reviewing sounds, blends, tricky words and reading our shared text 'Gorilla'.
Numeracy
Alongside some Essential Assessment testing in Number, Measurement, Algebra, Statistics and Space, we’ve kept Maths as hands-on as possible. Students have been:
Skip-counting by 2s, 5s and 10s and looking for patterns on number charts and number lines.
Exploring equal groups and fair sharing, including what happens when there are leftovers (remainders). Using number necklaces and large number lines to order numbers and talk about odd and even. As well as Beginning a location and mapping focus with positional language, simple zoo maps and grid coordinates.
Science
In Science, we’ve continued learning about push and pull forces through sports-based investigations. Students have been predicting and testing how different balls and equipment move when pushed, pulled or struck, and recording their ideas back in the classroom.
Genius Hour
Genius Hour has been a huge highlight! After our kite-building sessions, this fortnight we moved on to designing and building our own mini hot air balloons in teams of three. Students planned their designs, created lightweight “baskets” and decorations, then watched their balloons being filled with helium and tested out. We talked about what helps a balloon rise, how weight and balance affect its flight, and what changes they would make next time. We’ve also begun an Egg Drop Challenge, thinking like engineers to protect a fragile egg using different materials and designs.
InitiaLit & Reading
Foundation and Grade 1 groups have continued their InitiaLit lessons, focusing on CVCC words, blends, reviewing long and short vowel sounds, and tricky words. Students have rotated through guided reading, independent reading from their book boxes, and word-building games using letter tiles and magnetic letters.
News from the 2/3 Room
Another fortnight over?! We in the 2/3 room have been keeping busy over the past couple of weeks. There's been so much learning happening that we don't know where the time has gone!
In Literacy, we have been continuing our research and writing on our chosen animals. We are looking forward to sharing these with you in the coming weeks. In Spelling, our focus has been on words ending in 'ch', 'tch', 'tion', and now we are focusing on more complex vowel digraphs and trigraphs such as 'or' and 'ore'. We are getting to unpack the final chapters of Harry Potter by applying our comprehension skills that we have learnt over the past year.
In Numeracy, we have continued our focus on place value; unpacking numbers to successfully read, order and add large numbers. We have used 'place value houses' to read numbers into the millions successfully and have used a variety of maths equipment to order numbers beyond 1,000 or 10,000. We have also been practising partitioning large numbers in different ways, for example: 125 has 1 hundred, 2 tens and 5 ones, 12 tens and 5 ones, 125 ones etc.
4/5/6 Classroom
Miss Childs' Class / Mrs Wilson's Class
Firstly, some exciting news. Miss Childs has returned, and we are so glad to have her back!
In Literacy, we continue to practice our reader’s theatre to help strengthen our reading fluency. We are nearing the completion of our convict Biography posters and our early finishers are also creating a PowerPoint presentation. We have continued to work on our handwriting, spelling, editing and strengthening our vocabulary. We are almost finished our class novel, Tom Appleby Convict Boy.
In Math, the topics we have been working on are capacity and place value. We shifted to the kitchen to begin working with capacity. We looked at the different capacities of different jars/containers that were available in the kitchen and we ordered them according to what we thought would hold the least amount to the most amount, then we had to check to see if we were correct, some wonderful observations were made and we noted that the taller thinner glass, didn't hold as much as the shorter, more wider glass. Lots of great discussions were had. For Place Value we have been working on our understanding of how to regroup and rename numbers. We used MAB to design our names and then traded to find their values. We were then given 365 as a value and had to represent it in multiple ways to try and build the tallest tower with that value.
