What's happening in our learning spaces?
| STUDENTS OF THE WEEK - WEEK 9 | |
| FLW | Joshua - For the positive way you have engaged with your learning throughout the week. You have been a focused listener when instructions have been given. Great effort, Joshua! |
| FOS | Anya - For being a kind and caring friend who always looks out for others. You try your best in everything you do and are using your letter and sound knowledge to read tricky words. Keep shining Anya! Eliza - For always giving your best and showing a love of earning! You're learning your sight words like a champ and using them in your writing like a pro! You're a writing whiz! |
| FAM | Alfie - For engaging in all learning with enthusiasm and a positive attitude. You give everything a go, collaborate with others and always share your thinking. Amazing Alfie! |
| 1/2VS | Sienna - For being a positive collaborator when working in your group to find out about the festival of Holi. It is wonderful to see you take turns to share ideas and jobs. Amazing job Sienna! Julian - For showing persistence and putting in your best effort when writing your information report on Chinese culture. You are a star! Keep it up! |
| 1/2CW | Oliver - For your amazing effort in solving addition problems and trying new, efficient strategies to work them out – Outstanding Oliver! |
| 1/2NA | Gabriella M -For showing fantastic collaboration skills when working in a group while researching facts about South Africa. You listened to ideas respectfully and made sure everyone in your group could contribute. Amazing work! |
| 1/2OB | Harrison - For being enthusiastic in your learning by asking questions during maths lessons and making connections between addition and subtraction strategies. Hardworking Harrison! |
| 3/4BP | Liam - For being a curious researcher when gathering information on the Daintree Rainforest. You recorded your information neatly and in your own words. Well done Liam! |
| 3/4SH | Zac - For your impressive focus and determination this week. You’ve made excellent progress on your information report and artefact writing. Keep it up, Zac! Milana - For stepping out of your comfort zone, reaching out to others, and showing more of your personality. Keep it up - magnetic, Milana! |
| 5/6ZK | Joe - For your thoughtful contributions to our Resilience Project discussions, your ability to explore and understand a range of emotions was truly impressive! Well done, Joe! |
| 5/6MC | Susie - For the collaboration skills you demonstrated when working with others to solve challenging maths problems. Your persistence and teamwork was amazing! Well done Susie! |
| 5/6NT | Estelle - Estelle for your wonderful effort in completing all your classwork and homework to a high standard. Your commitment to excellence shines through in everything you do! A special mention goes to your incredibly clever silly story that incorporated all your spelling words - it was both creative and impressive! Keep up the fantastic work, Estelle. Caleb - Caleb for your outstanding news report on the Woolly Mammoth experiment. His article, Back from the Dead, was informative, engaging, and thoughtfully written. You showed excellent research skills, used expert quotes, and added a balanced discussion of different viewpoints. Your creativity and curiosity shine through. Well done Caleb! |
| MATHS | Lexi - Congratulations, Lexi, on your fantastic work in morning maths! You show an excellent attitude towards learning, and it's wonderful to see how much you're improving. Well done! |
| STUDENTS OF THE WEEK - WEEK 8 | |
| FLW | Lennox - For being a kind and inclusive friend to everyone in Foundation LW. Thank you for always showing care and friendship to others throughout the school day. You are a STAR, Lennox! Evanthia -For remaining focused when trying to improve your handwriting as you completed your written tasks throughout the week. Great effort, Evanthia! |
| FOS | Etienne -For being a communicating superstar. You contribute to all our class discussions with thoughtful comments and questions to deepen your thinking and understanding. Keep up all the incredible learning - I am so proud of you! Excellent Etienne! |
| FAM | Keanu - For being a wonderful thinker and listener, and for sharing so many amazing discoveries about different Cultures during Inquiry this week. Keep up the fantastic work Keanu! Ela - For the incredible effort and determination you are putting into your writing. You stretch out words, record sounds, use spaces and always try your very best. You are a true superstar! |
| 1/2VS | Mikayla - For being a confident problem solver. You show persistence and lots of effort when applying the most efficient strategy to solve addition problems. A wonderful mathematician! |
| 1/2CW | Benjamin - For your fantastic effort in writing interesting and informative non-fiction texts about Chinese culture. You’ve shared your knowledge in a clear and descriptive way – great job, Ben! |
| 1/2NA | Alessandra - For making fantastic progress with your writing by adding interesting details and confidently experimenting with writing paragraphs in your information report. Keep up the amazing work! |
| 1/2OB | Henry - For showing great leadership and collaboration skills when working in a team on your cultural topic. Keep it up, Helpful Henry! |
| 3/4BP | Alessia - For showing a positive attitude towards her learning each day. Amazing Alessia! |
| 3/4SH | Oscar - For his consistency and hard work across all his learning, and for being a great self-manager. Well done, Oscar! |
| 5/6ZK | Hazel - For your detailed research and thoughtful planning for your news article on tennis star Madison Keys shows your dedication to learning. Super work Hazel! |
| 5/6MC | Stella - For consistently working hard, completing your work to a high standard, and showing kindness to everyone, especially when helping others! Well done Stella! |
| 5/6NT | Zita - for her significant improvement on her post-decimal test! Her success is the result of her hard work, determination, and positive self-talk. Zita is a brilliant example of what can happen when you keep trying and believe in yourself. Well done, |
| Maths | Eden - Great job, Eden! You tackled the math problems with confidence and showed excellent use of efficient addition strategies. Well done! Lexi - Congratulations, Lexi, on your fantastic work in morning maths! You show an excellent attitude towards learning, and it's wonderful to see how much you're improving. Well done! |
| Literacy | Ava - This award celebrates and recognises the thoughtful preparation, independent research, and effective use of visuals completed at home to support and write your information report at school. Well done. Keep up the great work! |
FOUNDATION NEWS
It’s been a great week of learning in Foundation, as we inch closer and closer to our 100th day of school. Today marks Day 77 in Foundation, only 23 days to go! There is so much wonderful learning happening and we love sharing it with everyone.
As inquirers, we continued exploring Cultural Diversity. After mapping where our families all came from and sharing some of those traditions, foods, celebrations and games, we decided to further investigate three cultures. Mrs Wenckowski became an expert on Japan, Mrs Marsico became an expert on Germany and Ms Sargent became an expert on India. As researchers, each class visited the experts to learn more about each culture. We looked at photos, watched videos, listened to facts and information and engaged in different experiences, such as playing with German spinning tops and doing a traditional Indian dance. As thinkers and writers, we wrote about what we discovered. We have had time and opportunity to write good copies, draw detailed illustrations and diagrams and make different things to share with the community at our upcoming Celebration of Learning. To find out more and see our final creations, you will have to visit our learning spaces, ‘Japan’, ‘Germany’ and ‘India’ this Thursday afternoon from 3:30 to 5:00pm. Learning will also be displayed on Friday morning before we head off on our much anticipated excursion to CERES. We are so excited for both of these awesome experiences!
As mathematicians, we tuned in to Shape. We began identifying and sorting different 2D shapes and describing their features. Perhaps our most favourite part of Maths this week was going on a shape hunt around our school. We were excited to explore the yard and learning spaces to see how many triangles, circles, squares and rectangles we could find. Some of us tried to find a rhombus, hexagon, pentagon, parallelogram and trapezium. We found rectangular bricks, square windows, triangular roofs, rhombus’ all over the fence and circles right throughout the playgrounds. Inside the learning spaces, we were amazed to discover hexagons in our wall documentation and parallelograms hanging from the roof. We had so much fun learning about shapes in real life, and this week will create our very pictures of real life using shapes. We might make flowers with circles and hexagons, or a house with rectangles, squares and triangles- shapes are everywhere!
As part of The Resilience Project, we have been engaging in different GEM chats. Here is a GEM chat you may like to try at home during the week…
"When do you feel the happiest? Where are you? Who are you with? What makes you feel this way?”
What are we learning this week….
- Numeracy: We will continue exploring different 2D shapes, naming them, drawing them and identifying their features (sides, corners), such as square, triangle, circle, rectangle, rhombus, trapezium, pentagon and hexagon.
- Reading: Using learnt sounds to build, read and spell words and sentences, reading decodable story books (Learnt sounds: m, s, t, a, p, i, f, r, c, o, d, h)
- Writing: Writing short information texts for Inquiry- recording facts, recording different sounds we can hear in words, sight words, and using spaces and full stops.
- Inquiry: Sorting out our thinking about different Cultures, tuning in to the Aboriginal Culture.
- Religion: Catholic Jubilee Year 2025
- The Resilience Project: Mindfulness
If you wish to volunteer as a Parent Helper in your child’s learning space, and you have completed the induction program and have a current WWCC, please feel free to add your name to the timetables which are located on FLW’s door.
A friendly reminder that we are visiting CERES this Friday, 20th June. We will depart school by bus at 9:30am and return by 2:30pm. Please remember to bring a small backpack with brain food, recess, lunch and a water bottle. CERES encourage nude lunches and no packaging. Students are expected to be in their full sports uniform, and dress appropriately for the weather (rain coat, jackets, beanies etc, if required). Please contact your child’s teacher if you have any questions.
We can’t wait to tell you all about our very exciting week ahead!
Have a wonderful week,
Foundation Team- Alycia Marsico, Leanne Wenckowski and Olivia Sargent
YEAR 1/2 NEWS
What a fantastic two weeks we had last week! We continued learning about information reports and wrote one all about Chinese culture. In Maths, we explored different addition and subtraction strategies and practised choosing the most efficient way to solve problems. We also started getting ready for our Showcase of Learning — it’s coming up soon, and we are excited to share everything we have been working on! 1/2VS and 1/2NA also presented at assembly and did an incredible job.
As writers, we have been exploring information reports. We took on the challenge of writing our own! First, as researchers, we gathered interesting facts and key details about our topic - The Chinese Culture. Then, we used what we’ve learned to organise this information into a structured report. Some of us even experimented with using paragraphs and subheadings to make our writing clearer and more engaging. As self-managers, we analysed our writing using a checklist and set personal writing goals to help us improve even further. We have been working on these goals and are excited to share them with you.
As inquirers, we’ve been learning about the many cultures represented in our classroom. Over the past few weeks, we interviewed a family member to find out more about our own cultural backgrounds and then shared these with our peers. We tallied the different cultures in our class and now have a colourful display in our Learning Street — it’s amazing to see how many cultures are represented in 1/2! Each class has been assigned a culture to explore. Working in small groups, we’ve been researching and recording interesting facts. Each group is focusing on a different sub-topic, such as traditions, celebrations, dances, artefacts or food. Here are the cultures we’ve been exploring:
- Indian culture in 1/2VS
- Greek culture in 1/2CW
- Irish culture in 1/2VB
- South African culture in 1/2NA
It has been a fun and fascinating journey, and we can’t wait to share what we’ve learned at our upcoming Celebration of Learning!
As mathematicians, we’ve been building our understanding of different addition and subtraction strategies and learning how to choose the most efficient one for each problem. Our focus has been on explaining our thinking and justifying the strategies we use. We explored addition and subtraction by solving a variety of problems and thinking carefully about which strategy worked best in each situation. To help us, we used hands-on materials like double-sided counters, unifix blocks, tens frames and number lines. These tools helped us visualise the numbers and deepen our understanding of how addition works.
Vania Sparano, Nadia Ascenzo, Chloe Wang & Olivia Bovolato
1/2 Team
YEAR 3/4 NEWS
As spellers, we have been focusing on words that end in /le/ as in table and the digraph /se/ making the sound ‘s’ as in horse.
As learners of the Italian language, we attended an excursion to the Italian Museum to listen to migration stories, view different artefacts and share pizzas and gelato together. We also ventured down Lygon Street to locate different restaurants, shops and gelati places. Thank you to our parent helpers for supporting us on this day.
As dancers, we have been practising our routine for our upcoming dance performance on the 7th of August. To prepare for this performance, please read the following costume options for the night.
Our theme for this is 'Safari'. Your child can wear/ have:
- Black, brown or orange plain clothes only - no slogans
- Black socks and black sneakers
- Any animal print accessories (headband, scarf, scrunchie, belt etc)
- Girls to have a slicked back ponytail, with teased hair
- Boys to have messy styled hair
We look forward to welcoming you into our learning space this Thursday 19th June, for our Celebration of Learning. You can view our learning in the SLA from 3:30-5pm and again on Friday 20th June from 8:30-9:30am. Assembly will be held at 9:30am.
Year 3/4 Teachers
Belinda Panzarino & Sarah Hogan
YEAR 5/6 NEWS
As we approach the tail end of Term 2, it’s a great time to pause and reflect on what has been a productive and engaging week 9 of learning in Year 5/6. With just three weeks to go, it’s clear that our students have embraced opportunities to challenge themselves, think critically, and develop their skills as learners and leaders.
As writers, students explored the features of news articles, learning how to craft attention-grabbing headlines, write engaging leads, and organise information clearly and concisely. They considered the importance of journalistic integrity, the role of bias, and the power of asking thoughtful, open-ended questions. We look forward to inviting you in for the Celebration of Learning to showcase our newspaper articles. The Celebration of Learning will be on the 19th of June and we hope to see as many of you there. Please refer to school communications for further details.
As part of our spelling we took a break from learning a new rule and had a review week. We reviewed the spelling rules: -pre, -post, -mis and -ti. We looked at the sounds and syllables found in the words. It is great to see how confident we have gotten in breaking the sounds up.
As mathematical thinkers, last week we explored Area and Perimeter in shapes. As part of our learning, some of us created block letters. This is where we measured the area and the perimeter of the letters used to make our names. We also explored identifying missing sides of shapes and calculating the perimeter and area of these shapes.
A shout out to Angelina from 5/6ZK! Last week, Angelina competed in a Basketball Tournament in Ballarat, where Angelina's VJBL Rep team competed and had lots of fun. Angelina not only represents one team, she also plays in two other teams in different leagues, including an Eastern club's first division team (in the EDJBL) that selected her this season. We wish Angelina all the best in her basketball journey and can’t wait to hear what's next!
Year 5/6 Team
Bianka Zorzut, Vicky Karalis, Maddie Comrie and Nick Tresize