Stories From the Classroom

Year 5/6- Mrs Kaysie Stephens

Hello families!

Year 5/6 have been engaging in some wonderful excursions and incursions over the past few weeks! On Thursday the 7th of March, 5/6 were excited to have Tom Walsh from Junction Support Services who came to deliver an Animation Workshop. The workshop used a story template that students had to follow to create their own story. Each story had a beginning, a complication, a resolution and an ending. The class then recorded their stories and then was able to create a character to read and act through the story. This was not only great as a Literacy activity, but it was designed to have students think about creative problem solving skills they could use in real situations that they might encounter at school. It was such an engaging workshop for all of our students! 

On Friday the 8th of March, Year 6 students attended a 'Pizza Smarts' activity at Corryong College. This was a wonderful program delivered by La Trobe University that was designed to get the students to think about the personal strengths they have and how they can use these in everyday life. It looked at the creative and analytical parts of the brain and the areas that we are more confident in, or the different 'smarts' that we have. Each 'smart' was symbolised by the various toppings of a pizza. The students' job was to move to each station and see if they possessed any of the strengths in that area. the areas that were covered were:

Number Smarts: Likes to figure things out and is a great problem solver.

Creative Smarts: Likes to hum tunes and draw, is great at noticing patterns and rhythms.

Physical Smarts: Likes to move around and is great at physical activities like sport.

Caring Smarts: Likes to care for people, animals, nature or the environment.

Curious Smarts: Likes to know why things happen and discovering things.

Planning Smarts: Likes to build and create things and has a great imagination. 

People Smarts: Likes to have lots of friends and is great at listening to others.

Word Smarts: Likes to read, write and tell stories, and has a good memory. 

It was really wonderful to see the students identifying their personal strengths throughout this activity. Some of the year 6 students were even surprised to discover the 'smarts' that they had without realising it. This was truly a wonderful experience for our leaders of the school. I hope to see them demonstrating these 'smarts' both at school and at home!

Foundation/Year 1 - Miss Whitehead

In Literacy, foundation students have been learning about sounds. We have learnt the sounds /m/, /s/, /t/ and /a/, we have been using this newfound knowledge to read and write words such as am, at, sat, mat Sam and Tam. In Year 1 we have been learning about compound words (a word that is made up of two smaller words eg cupcake), nouns and are now focusing on reading and writing words with two syllables.

In writing, we have been reading lots of books and breaking down texts to understand the structure and message. We have been introduced to a range of new vocabulary words and continue to use our creative talents to make characters from our stories.

In mathematics, we are still learning about all things counting and place value. We have been working on reading, writing and ordering numbers. More recently we have been thinking about numbers that are 'one more' or 'one less' than.