Classroom Happenings

YEARS 5 AND 6

The Learning Pit 

The Learning Pit has recently been introduced to Grade 5/6 as a way to visually help students understand how learning something new can feel really challenging—and sometimes even a bit impossible.

The idea behind the Learning Pit is that when we’re given a new challenge, whether it’s in maths, sport, or even something at home, we often start off feeling excited. It sounds interesting and fun! But once we try it, we realise it’s actually trickier than we thought. That moment of struggle is what we call “going into the pit.”

As a class, we’ve been talking about what we can do when we find ourselves in the pit, and we’ve come up with three main strategies:

1. Ask for help – from the teacher, an LSO, a classmate, or an adult at home.
2. Practise and make mistakes – this is often the most important one. Mistakes help us see what we don’t know so we can learn and improve. A blank sheet will always equal 0%, but giving it a go, even if it’s wrong, gives us something to build on.
3. Connect it to what you do know – using familiar ideas or concepts can help us make sense of something new and tricky.

We’ve been doing tasks designed to get students into the pit and give them the chance to find their way out. It’s been wonderful to watch them work through that uncomfortable part of learning and come out the other side stronger, more confident, and more capable than before!

Learning

What a wonderful start to term 2! 

It has been great having our students back in the classroom for the past few weeks, and we have begun some very exciting units. 

In Literacy we are working with the book ‘How Was That Built?’ a non-fiction explanation text about how different structures are created. 

Students are currently in the process of designing and building their own skyscraper structures out of popsicle sticks, and there’s definitely a few future engineers in our midst! In Maths we have begun our unit on perimeter and area, specifically looking at regular and irregular polygons. Our Inquiry for the past week has been looking at our focus muscle and our attention spans. 

We have been brainstorming healthy things to do that avoid too much short, overstimulating content to make sure our attention spans can stay long enough for when we are learning at school. 

The class has been encouraged to focus on reading, going outside to play, drawing, and using our creativity when at home!

I look forward to the rest of our term and continuing with such wonderful learners.

YEARS 2/3 AND 4

The Learning Pit

In 2/3/4 we have been introduced to the concept of ‘The Learning Pit’. Essentially, The Learning Pit is a tool that helps students to understand that new learning is a challenge and that we experience a variety of uncomfortable feelings when we are learning a challenging skill. The Learning Pit is a picture that gives the students a visual of how learning happens. 

As learning activity, our class created a simple puzzle in teams. They then cut the puzzle into pieces and went head-to-head with another team to try and solve their puzzle- this was a lot harder than we thought! We didn’t know what the puzzle looked like before putting it together and some pieces were very small! We were deep in the learning pit. 

One of the key learnings that 2/3/4 have taken from The Learning Pit is that struggle, failure and mistakes are all NORMAL and NECESSARY parts of learning. To grow- we must make mistakes. 

Mothers Day

Thank you to all of the mums, grandmothers, nans and special people who came to celebrate Mother’s Day with us at Sacred Heart. It was very exciting to have you all visit our classroom and participate in some shared reading and hangman! We hope that you had a wonderful time visiting us!

Hands on learning has been lots of fun in our classroom!

In Maths, we have been learning all about Fractions. The students have been looking at breaking up shapes and collections into parts, matching equivalent fractions and working with improper and mixed fractions. 

In our new unit, Length, we have been building on our knowledge of formal units of measurement to accurately measure objects around the classroom in millimetres, centimetres, metres and kilometres. 

Literacy

2/3/4 have been focusing on creating explanation texts that had tied in well with our ‘Off We Go Around Australia Book’ by Roland Harvey. The book follows a family as they adventure all around Australia. It has been brilliantly illustrated with pictures that are hilarious and packed full of so much information. To keep in with the theme of the book, we have been learning about how waterfalls are made. The students have been reading a variety of texts to support their growing knowledge surrounding this topic and we then put all of this information into an Explanation Text so that we could share our knowledge with others. 

That is all from us at this stage! See you in the next newsletter!

Mrs Stephens and 2/3/4 🙂

FOUNDATION AND YEAR 1

What a wonderful first few weeks we've had in Foundation and Year 1! 

From hands-on health lessons to heartfelt celebrations, our classroom has been full of joy, learning and connection.

It was such a joy to welcome so many mums, nans and special people into our classroom for our Mother's Day Celebration on Friday. 

Thank you for joining us and enthusiastically jumping into the Learning Pit—a concept we use to help students embrace challenges, take risks in their learning, and understand that mistakes help us grow. The task? Who could build the tallest tower using 

matchsticks and Playdoh!

There were many ideas shared, strategies tested, and structures rebuilt as students and their special guests worked together to solve the problem and persevere through setbacks. The room was buzzing with collaboration, creativity and determination.

The children absolutely loved sharing this experience with you—it was a wonderful way to explore what resilient learning looks (and feels!) like in action.

While not everyone was able to attend, please know you were very much in our thoughts!

Earlier in the week, students also explored healthy eating by designing and creating their own nutritious snacks. It was fantastic to see them being adventurous with new flavours and showing such curiosity and excitement as they tried different foods.