Primary School

Time is certainly flying by! Last Friday, our sense of ‘one school’ was beautifully reinforced when our Year One students took to the stage to high-five the Year Twelve students from their House during the Valedictory Assembly. It is always heartwarming to hear the reflections of Year Twelves as they reminisce about their time in Primary School, recalling key events and milestones that still resonate with them. One standout event that always gets mentioned is the Interhouse Athletics Carnival, and today we saw exactly why. We look forward to sharing more about it in next week's article.

We are looking forward to watching the Pre-Primary class present their first Primary School Assembly item. This is our last assembly of the year and will start at an earlier time of 2:00pm to allow for extra awards.

Read on to discover what has been happening in each classroom over the last week…

Primary School: Year level Information and News

Djinda: During Week Three the Djinda students will be reading the picture book, ‘The Little Red Hen’. The children will be completing activities based on this beautiful story. These include a handprinted hen and a mask! So much fun!

Kindergarten: Looking at nature and our beautiful school environment has prompted many exciting conversations. This week our class wanted to look at the lifecycle of a turtle and an elephant! We made butterfly lifecycles and constructed each part of the cycle ourselves. Athletics Carnival games practice has been a big learning curve for Kindergarten, and we are working out that balancing and jumping can be very tricky, but we are having so much fun being involved and joining our Houses for the first time!

Pre-Primary: The students in Pre-Primary have been enthusiastically practising their assembly performance and we are all so excited to share our learning with parents, staff and students this Friday. In Science and Technology, we have been exploring how different objects move and what factors affect movement. Spinning toys have been very engaging to students this week. In Health, students have been exploring different feelings. It was lots of fun to create Grumble planes after sharing the book Grumble Boats to learn a new strategy to rid ourselves of negative emotions in a positive way. In HASS, students have been sharing their favourite celebrations with their peers and we have started exploring the difference between celebrations and commemorations.

Year One: The Year Ones have had great fun learning the poem ‘The Day the Zoo Escaped’ as part of their Talk for Writing unit on poetry. This poem has wonderful examples of verbs and adverbs, and the children delighted in putting actions to the poem. The tongue twister ‘Peter Piper’ tested our speed of articulation, and we began reading the second of our ‘Jolly Postman’ books. Elliott provided us with a great introduction to our analysis of birthdays (Happy birthday, Elliott!) where we explored how each family celebrates these annual events and, in particular, the importance of light and sound in these events.

Year Two: The students were excited to venture down to the Wild Space to investigate living creatures in our surroundings. In Science, we have been investigating the different types of animals and discussed how scientist, through studying, have been able to put them in groups as well as determining what characteristics are needed to be in these groups. We were excited to see everything from mammals to birds and insects but were quite happy not to see any of the slithering kind of reptiles on our walk.

Year Four: In Year Four Health, we have been looking at setting our personal boundaries such as “I feel uncomfortable when people yell or speak too loudly” and “I prefer people to not hug me”. We found out that these boundaries are created based on what is important to us. Respecting these boundaries for others and ensuring our own boundaries have created some rich discussions. We have put these into action through role-playing scenarios where boundaries can be tested. Scripting and brainstorming appropriate ways in which to tell someone that they might be making us feel uncomfortable has helped us start putting these into our everyday lives.

Year Five: The Year Five students have returned from the past and begun exploring poems, and wrote our first personification poems on anything that was interesting to us. Some of us wrote about motorbikes and skateboards while others were very original and used fruit being blended as their examples. In Mathematics, we have just started an investigation: Are the squares in 10 square (outside Year Six) the same area? We will have the results for you next week.

Specialists

Nihongo (Japanese)

Year Five/Six: This week students have been learning about sports and recreation in Japanese culture. Students have learned the names of various sports in Japanese, including how to ask others what sports they play and how to express likes and dislikes. We have also learned about the annual national holiday ‘Taiiku no Hi’ (Health and Sports Day), what a typical Japanese primary school athletics carnival looks like, and how to do ‘Radio Taiso’ (radio calisthenics) as a warmup before physical exercise.