What's happening in our learning spaces? 

FOUNDATION 

We have been getting up to so much fun in the Foundation learning spaces this week with new experiences in religion and writing.  

As members of the Catholic Faith community, we are exploring the uniqueness and importance of our names. We are learning to understand that each of us has a  name and our names have special significance. To engage our families in our learning, families were asked to complete a task about their child's name, who chose it, how it was chosen and what is the meaning behind a chosen name. We will continue to unpack this in our learning at school over the coming weeks. 

The month of October holds special significance in the Catholic Church as it dedicates the whole month to Our Lady and the Rosary. Last week we began to unpack and explore the special prayers associated with saying the Rosary; Glory Be, Hail Mary and Our Father. Over the coming weeks, we will begin to learn these important prayers and recite them daily. We had time and opportunity to engage with our Buddies to create a one-decade replica of the Rosary Beads. This was a very special moment for the Foundation students to spend quality time with their Buddies. 

As writers, we are beginning to explore Procedural Writing and the steps involved in creating this writing. Procedural texts often tell us how to make or create something in a sequential order such as a recipe, lego instructions or origami. Last week there was lots of excitement as we followed a recipe to make Fairy Bread. The Foundation students enjoyed buttering their own bread and shaking the sprinkles onto the bread. But the best part was...eating the fairy bread! To further enhance our understanding of procedural texts, we then had the opportunity to write our own recipe for Fairy Bread.

On Friday 20th October, students will need to wear “Crazy Coloured Socks” with their school uniform and bring in a gold coin donation which will be donated to The Catholic Missions “Socktober” campaign to enrich the lives of vulnerable children. There will be lots of dancing too at the F-2 disco and we look forward to enjoying our Hot Food pizza and ice-cream lunch on Friday as well!.

Have a great week everyone! 

Thank you, 

Leanne and Alex 

FoundationTeam

YEAR 1/2

Welcome to another week in 1/2, where lots of great learning has occurred!

As mathematicians, we have been tuning in to the concept of Division by listening to the story ‘The Doorbell Rang’, written by Pat Hutchins. We were very excited to use playdough to act out and represent different parts of the story. As thinkers, we had to share cookies equally between a number of children. We had to think about how many cookies each child would get and create sentences such as 12 cookies shared between 3 people gives 4 cookies each. Throughout the week, we continued to solve different division number stories, for example: 

• There are 15 students in the class. We want to make 3 equal groups. How many students would be in each group? 
• Mum bought 30 lollies for the party. She wasn’t sure how many children were attending the party. What are the different ways that she could equally share the lollies? 

As members of a faith community, we have had time and opportunity to observe and explore a provocation with a variety of words and images associated with God's creation. Through the thinking routine Looking Ten Times Two we have looked closely at specific images and developed thinking around what these images make us think about. Here are some of our thoughts: 

• God created the world as a gift for us and he wanted it to be special for us so that we can enjoy it and take care of it. (Hunter) 
• We must love the world while we still can. (Riley) 
• The message from God is to love the world is to take care of the world. (Eva K)
• God gave us an important gift, the whole world, the trees, plants and nature. We need to respect what he gave us. (Isabel)
• The sunlight when we give the earth to new generations. (Vivienne)

Through The Resilience Project, we have been learning to identify our emotions when we show and receive kindness. As thinkers, we created kindness statements about our peers in our learning space to share with each other. We had time to reflect on this experience and talk about how this made us feel. Check out our kindness trees below!    

We hope everyone has a lovely week and look forward to the week ahead as we tune into Persuasive Texts and unpack our very exciting excursion to the Royal Botanic Gardens!

1/2 Team, 

Alycia Marsico, Vania Sparano and Vicky Karalis 

YEAR 3/4

We have had a wonderful start to our last term of the year! 

This term we are inquiring into, ‘How does the land change and why?’ As part of this inquiry, we will be investigating how the land has changed from the past, looking into how humans and the environment have impacted the changes in the land. 

Throughout this term, we will be also inquiring into writing factual narratives. We have begun this inquiry by identifying some texts that are factual narratives and unpacking the structure, grammar and information included in the text. We will be unpacking this with the children and this will be placed on our walls to be used as a third teacher for students when writing their own factual narratives later on in the term. 

Last term, we engaged in unpacking Information Reports, we classified them into three tiers, Tier 1 texts having basic adjectives and mainly simple sentences, Tier 2 texts having more descriptive and specific adjectives with compound sentences and Tier 3 having complex sentences with content-specific vocabulary. The children used this as a tool to bump up and improve their writing, this week ask your child about how they used the wall in their writing!

Students received their first Home learning item last Monday, this is due at the end of this week. Please ensure your child has participated in their home learning and nightly reading. A reminder that the Year 3/4 Students created the checklist that is sent home with their home learning, this was made to support students to track their reading progress.

A reminder that we have sent out our notes for our Royal Botanical Gardens Excursion on Wednesday 8th November.  If you have not done so could you please return the note by this Wednesday (18th October).

We are looking forward to many amazing events we have this term, one being our Year 3/4 Maths Games Day. This will take place on Thursday the 9th of 12 pm November, we hope to see you all there during the day!

Important dates for Year 3/4 in Term 4:

We hope you have a wonderful week!

Year 3/4 Teachers

Belinda Panzarino & Bianka Zorzut

YEAR 5/6

Our Inquiry's big question this term is, “How do communities meet geographical challenges?” We have begun to tune in and find out about natural disasters that affect communities and how people in the community respond to the challenges with support from others not in that geographical community. We are looking at bushfires, floods, earthquakes and others to see the effects of the disasters and how communities respond  before, during and after the event.  

In literacy we are writing explanation text type and are using natural disasters as the prompt for their writing. The non-fiction focus within the text is cause and effect using linking words and phrases to describe how and why a natural phenomenon occurs.

In maths we continue with division. Students have multiple entry points into the topic using the short division algorithm to show remainders as whole numbers, fractions or decimals. We are also looking at the language of division through worded division problems.

All students should have received an excursion permission slip to attend Melbourne Museum and the Imax theatre. Please return this as soon as possible. 

In Religion we have been looking at the Holy Rosary. Students made their own rosary beads and helped the Foundation students make them as well in a 5/6/Foundation buddy activity. We will be comparing Creation through different interpretations to challenge students to think about their relationship with God.

In TRP students have reflected on positive thinking and the use of mottos and sayings that inspire and encourage people to work through challenging times and adversity.