Merri-bek Mail

Learning Areas

Foundation

The Foundation students have had a great start to 2024!

 

This term, our primary focus has been on establishing the routines that will guide us throughout the rest of the year. These routines involve setting up the table for reading and writing lessons, properly packing away equipment, returning to class after outdoor breaks, and respectfully taking turns to share and listen during class discussions.

 

In Literacy, we have continued to work on segmenting and blending sounds in both Reading and Writing. We have been looking at new vocabulary of books; beginning, middle and end and have been practicing our Phonics through many hands-on activities. Please continue to practice the chants as well as the ones below, which we will be practicing in the next two weeks:

 

In the Igloo, /i/, /i/, /i/

Crazy Kites, /c/, /c/, /c/

Bounce Balloons, /b/, /b/, /b/

Happy House, /h/, /h/, /h/

 

In great news, our home reader program has begun and thank you to everyone who is bringing their Blue Home Reading Bag (with their name clearly marked on the front) and reading diary to school every day. The students change their readers every day and bring home levelled books to share with you. In other news, Library borrowing has started (Joe -Tuesday, Lexi – Wednesday, Arwen – Thursday). Each student will receive a free library bag from school, which they will use to bring their books to and from school.

 

In Mathematics, we have been exploring statistics and probability. We have been experimenting with collecting data and analysing data. Students have been asking yes or no questions to their peers and collecting data using tally marks. The students have had fun creating cool sandwiches and asking their classmates if they would eat it.

 

We trust that your child has already shared some of the positive experiences they've had. If you have any concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to your child's teacher.

 

Happy weekend!

The Foundation Team

 

 Grade 1/2

 The term is flying by in Grade 1/2, with lots of wonderful learning and playing happening in each classroom. It was also great to chat with so many families this week in our Meet and Greet evening.

 

Our students have now really settled into their classrooms, and we are impressed with how settled each group is already, in terms of knowing their classroom routines, working well alongside their friends, helping with packing up, tidying books or watering plants, remembering hats, water bottles and library books, and even managing to remain kind, patient and respectful on those super hot days that we've been having! 

 

In Literacy, we enjoyed our focus on recounts for the first half of the term, and the 'language experience' approach of doing a hands-on activity followed by writing extended recounts about this experience. For example, students have written recounts about making and parading our huge dragon for Lunar New Year, about washing clothes by hand as part of our history unit, and about watching a science experiment using Skittles! We have now begun a unit on narrative writing and are enjoying creating characters, settings and some truly entertaining narrative arcs including falling into volcanoes, meeting magical narwhals, or being abducted by Storm Troopers and saved by not-evil witches.

 

In maths we have just begun a unit on place value. This is about building an understanding of the way that numbers work in terms of ones, tens, hundreds, and beyond. These are tricky but crucial concepts and students are working hard to master skills such as understanding that 20 tens is the same as 2 hundreds, or being able to quickly sort a collection of objects into tens and ones in order to compare and order numbers.

 

History has been a really fun part of our week, with our focus on local Brunswick and Coburg history. We have learned about different architectural eras (all visible on one short walk from MPS down to Warr Park!) and the differences between how people washed clothes, cooked and heated their houses now and in our suburb's early days. Students were especially captivated and disgusted to learn about the role that the "Dunny Can Man" used to play up and down Coburg and Brunswick's back laneways! We have also learned about the history of Sydney Road and the different eras of trams, starting with horse drawn trams. We are looking forward to an incursion in Week 8 and 9, when we will get to experience what school was like 150 years ago using ink and nibs and being expected to be 'seen but not heard'!

 

Looking forward to a couple more weeks of term, and then ahead to the holidays!

 

From the Grade 1/2 team: Hannah, Luciana, Luisa, Tom, Kerry and Daniel. 

Grade 3/4

Hi families and carers of 3/4,

 

It was a pleasure to meet (and welcome back) so many of you on Tuesday night at Meet The Teacher Evening.

 

We want to begin by thanking the parent helpers who came along to our excursion to the Immigration museum last Thursday. The students had a valuable experience learning about various migration stories and this has helped them to develop their own research of a migration story for their project. We also want to thank families who took the time to help with their research. Students will be creating and presenting their project by the end of term.

 

In Literacy, students were guided through each step of the writing process and each completed a published version of a personal recount. They looked at the text features of recounts through a range of texts including Alison Lester’s ‘Are We There Yet?’, ‘The Little Refugee’ by Anh Do and ‘Sam’s Bush Journey’ by Sally Morgan and Izekiel Kwaymullina. Students have more recently begun a unit on narratives where we look at the structural features of a narrative and invite students to engage readers using various strategies such as ‘show, not tell’.

 

In Mathematics, students have been widening their knowledge of the place value system by comparing, ordering and expanding numbers up to 5 digits. They ‘renamed’ numbers by showing understanding that a number such as 23 can be expressed as 2 tens and 3 ones, 23 ones, or 1 ten and 13 ones. This week, students are practising how to estimate, locate and plot numbers on a number line. For the remainder of the term, students will be learning about measurement including what units of measurement we use for estimating and calculating length.

 

Overall, students have had a fantastic start to the term and we look forward to seeing their growth over the coming year!

 

Questions you can ask children:

  • Which object did you hold when you were sitting at the big tables at the Immigration Museum?
  • What’s the learning pit?
  • What was your favourite activity at Twilight Sports?

Warm regards,

The 3/4 team (Elena, Keerththana, Miss Jennah, Thomas, Mrs Ventura, Daisy and Stefanie)

 

Grade 5/6

Hello wonderful 5/6 families,

 

What a jam packed Term 1 we have had so far!

 

On Friday 16th February, the Grade 6 leaders travelled into the city with Tori and Costa to the Young Leaders Conference held at the Melbourne Convention Centre. At the conference, there were many exciting speakers who spoke about the qualities that it takes to be a leader including resilience, perseverance and passion. Some of the speakers who presented at the conference were Australian Ninja Warrior, Bryson Klein, Meteorologist, Jane Bunn, and former captain of the Matildas, Melissa Barbieri. The students really enjoyed hearing about their different experiences and learnt a lot about leadership and success. 

 

Last week, the whole school community had one of our favourite annual events, Twilight Sports! It was fantastic to see so much of the school community come together for this event. Our Grade 6 House Captains did a fantastic job of rousing their groups and houses to participate and get into the house spirit. Everyone had a great evening. Also in sporting news, the 5/6s have been having fun playing interschool sport at different schools over the past term. The softball, basketball and bat tennis teams have been representing the school proudly and showing persistence and great sports spirit.

 

The Grade 5s have begun NAPLAN this week and have been working very hard. On Wednesday, they completed their writing test, they have also sat for their reading test on Thursday and Friday is language conventions. Meanwhile, the Grade 6s have been practising their debating skills by preparing and presenting a structured argument on a topic in teams. It has been great to see the students develop their critical thinking and public speaking skills.

 

In the learning area, the students have just begun a unit of learning about historical fiction. Historical narratives are such a rich area of study and this year, the students have an opportunity to tie in their Project Based Learning to a historical fiction text. They are reading a selection of historical narratives including a fantastic series of novels by Jackie French as well having the opportunity to write their own historical narrative. These historical narratives will be based on the histories created for their PBL community. The Island project for PBL allows students to create communities within their classrooms, which will then make up the states (each grade) and altogether, the 5/6 cohort is the country of Vie Elet. Throughout the next two terms, the students will create these communities, each with their own industry, community, currency, economy and history which creates a rich foundation for their narrative writing. The students and the teachers are super excited to share all of this learning at the end of Term 2 with the whole school community.

 

Have a great weekend!

 

Tori, Simon, Harriet, Jacinta and Sandra :) 

PE

District Swimming Trials

On Tuesday 27th February, 24 Grade 3-6 students competed at the Coburg District Swimming Trials. Everybody did an amazing job and should be proud of their efforts. We had a number of students that qualified for the Division Swimming Championships to be held on Tuesday 12th March. Congratulations to the following swimmers:

  • Orla - 1st in Freestyle, 1st in Breaststroke
  • Mila - 1st in Freestyle
  • Amaya - 2nd in Backstroke
  • Marcel - 1st in Backstroke
  • Harlow - 1st in Breaststroke
  • Sathya - 2nd in Breaststroke
  • Veronica - 2nd in Breaststroke
  • Arlo - 1st in Breaststroke

The following students also qualified in the relay events:

  • Orla, Veronica, Dayton & Roisin - 2nd in Freestyle Relay
  • Amaya, Sophie, Delilah & Mila - 1st in Freestyle Relay 
  • Orla, Veronica, Mila, Lily - 1st in Medley Relay
  • Daniel, Marcel, Declan, Arlo - 1st in Medley Relay

District Tennis Trials

On Tuesday 12th March some students from Merri-bek PS participated in the District Tennis Trials, competing in a round robin to qualify for the Division Tennis Championships. Everyone did an amazing job.

  • Sathya finished in 2nd place and will progress to the Division Tennis Championships to be held on Monday 18th March - we wish her good luck!
  • Arlo finished in 3rd place

Well done to everyone who competed!