Community Report
October Update
The Achilles Community are very excited to be back for our final term of 2019!
In Reading, we have been learning about making inferences, such as predicting, making connections and thinking about the big idea of a story, such as perseverance, or courage; in other words, the themes and messages that the author conveys - and asking the question: what life lesson can we learn from this story?
Our community have continued to work on individual reading goals, and making sure that our book bags have a ‘just right’ book and a ‘book of interest’ at all times, to support maintaining our daily home reading - which we all agree is one of the biggest keys to success!
In Writing, we are learning about different cultural stories, such as fables, revising our understanding of narrative structure, and also learning emotive language to enhance our persuasive writing!
We have been learning about base 10 in Maths: progressing our understanding of 3, 4, 5 and 6 digit numbers, and even going on to learn about tenths and hundredths! This week we are starting our work on Fractions and Decimals.
HOW CAN I BE AN ACTIVE CITIZEN?
Our Inquiry wall now represents how we feel as active citizens of our Achilles Community, our school community, our community of Hume, Melbourne - and Australia!
We have been learning about the three levels of government: local, state and federal and have been participating in activities that help us to be an active citizen.
One of the ways we have been active citizens is learning about democracy. We had a democratic vote in Achilles, where we voted on what to name our current community pets: a family of Leaf insects!
We have also been sharing and discussing immigration stories. If you have a family story to share, please discuss it with your child, so that they may share it with our community if they wish to!
In SEL (Social and Emotional Awareness) we have been continuing to build our leadership skills through regular community meetings run by students, and students' management of community jobs and maintaining our learning spaces.
THINGS TO REMEMBER:
- Our excursion to the Melbourne Immigration Museum is on Wednesday 6th of November. Students who have returned their permission forms and made payments should be at school no later than 8.50am with a packed lunch in a small or plastic bag. A bottle of water is recommended.
If an Achilles Community student is not attending the excursion, they may attend school and will spend the day visiting another community in our school and practising their reading, writing and maths.
- We encourage students to read for at least 15 minutes each night, and to choose from a range of different texts, such as, the many genres of fiction (realistic, fantasy, Sci-Fi, mystery, comics, etc.) non-fiction, books, websites, and other media.
- We also encourage students to regularly practise learning multiplication facts/times tables. It is recommended to start by memorising 2s, 5s and 10s, and then 3s and 4s, and then the rest, up to 10 times tables.
- All students have reading goals in their school diaries - please check with your child weekly to ask about their reading goals and remind them to focus on that goal when reading at home. Currently, we are conducting one-on-one reading tests - and the results are outstanding!
- Your local library is a great place to visit on the weekend! Ask the library staff for a schedule, or see this link, as all libraries run free workshops for children and adults, and provide valuable resources to support your child's learning.
- We provide students with a new dictation every Monday (except Cup week) pasted in their school diaries. These dictations include their spelling focus of the week, and also encourage punctuation skills, grammar and sentence structure.