School News 

Prep

What an amazing first two weeks of school our Prep students have had! They have settled into the routines of school life so quickly and have learnt so many new things already. 

A highlight of our week in Prep is our Wednesday afternoon PMP session. PMP stands for Perceptual Motor Program and is designed to help children improve their gross motor skills, fine motor skills and balance. The children work in small groups and rotate through different physical activities. We have the added bonus of being able to listen to fun music while we practise our skills. It is lovely to see all the children working together. 

We would also like to celebrate our first group of Prep Shining Stars. Each Friday afternoon, the Shining Star award is presented to a student in each class who worked hard to demonstrate our school values. In week 2 our shining stars were: George from PBM, Sonny from PAH and Lenny from PKH. In week 3 our shining stars were Poppy from PBM, Molly from PAH and Jayden PKH. We would like to say a very big congratulations to these students and we look forward to seeing who the next shining stars are. 

We have some big events coming up in the next few weeks with school photos and Athletics day. Please keep an eye out on Compass for further information. 

We hope you all have a lovely and safe weekend.

The Prep Team

Allie Harrison, Kayla Hartrick, Elyce Munnecke and Laina Brebner

Grade 1 & 2

Hi everyone! 

We hope you are all coping well with the warm weather! The Level 1/2 students are loving playing with their friends in the sunshine. The children have settled into school routines and are immersing themselves in learning.

In Reading, we have been focussing on the strategy of prediction. The students are learning how predicting before, during and after reading can help us to understand the text on a deeper level. Remember to read with your child four nights and week and complete their reading log.

In Writing, we have been using our imagination to write interesting diary entries. We will now look at the features of recounts and learn to write well structured and informative personal recounts. 

In Maths, we have continued to build our understanding of place value. We are learning to read, write, order and represent 2, 3 and even 4 digit numbers!

The students are highly engaged in their Inquiry topic of 'Places and Spaces.' They are enjoying learning about being part of a community and the community resources that are important to us. 

We will be designing and creating community buildings and would really appreciate donations of small boxes e.g. a Shapes biscuit box that could be used for this purpose. Please send donations into school with your child.

Please enjoy a selection of photographs to show the students enjoying their learning environment.

The Level 1/2 Team

Llinos Poole, Sally Newton, Tim Huntington, Emma Wright and Veronica Paps

Grade 3 & 4

Hi Level 3/4 Families!

The term is already in full swing and can’t believe we are already at the conclusion of Week 4! The students have continued to settle in super well and have been participating in lots of fun and engaging learning.

In Reading, our focus has been on how author’s use language to impact their audience. We have read many picture books to look at descriptive language of settings and even watched a selection of Pixar short films to find mood in different characters. This week, making connections has been our focus, in particular, text to self and text to text connections. We finished off with our Term 1 Learning task which focussed on the above-mentioned skills with the two texts, ‘Piper’ and ‘Magic Beach’.

In Writing, the students followed the theme of descriptive language and word choice to write creative sizzling starts. We used different photo prompts to create ideas and vocabulary that could then be used to write an opening paragraph. This included the writing of their Learning Task in Week 3. This week, students have taken their sizzling start idea, to plan and draft a full narrative.

In Maths, we have continued our learning of place value. Students have worked with a variety of numbers (some into hundreds of thousands!) to make, name, record, compare and sequence. Some of our learning included understanding number properties, making number patterns and rounding numbers to the nearest 10 and 100. This culminated in the completion of the Term 1 Learning Task.

In Inquiry, our focus has been looking at the history of the European settlement from both the perspective of the English on the First Fleet voyages and from the First Nations people who were on the land first. This week we have started to look at what an artefact is, what is a historian, and begin to look at artefacts that were used over 200 years ago.

In Science, we are focussing on Biology and have looked at classifying living things, including animals and plants. This week we had the students sketching, labelling and classifying plants. We went on a plant hunt around the school and sketched different plants that were found and discussed what was important for plants to live, and how this helps the environment.

Here are a few photos of 3/4S presenting their learning from an Inquiry lesson.

The Level 3/4 Team

Hayley Peirce, Damien Smith, Sarah Jones, Renée Barnden & Brent Smith

Grade 5 & 6

Hi Level 5/6 families!

Can you believe we are approaching the half way point of the term already? 

It would be remiss of us not to first mention our super fun excursion to Quantum this week. 

Year 5 students worked with Minecraft to explore Indigenous connections to land, resources and sustainability. They collected resources and worked together in teams to create food, shelter and tools. After lunch students returned to their computers and 'world' to find that their town had been invaded and things had changed. We were so impressed with the empathy they showed and connections they were able to make with previous learning. 

Year 6 students worked with Lego Mindstorm robotics and completed missions related to space travel. They used their place value knowledge to work out that their robots needed 15.2 rotations to reach the mark and stop with their wheels in an exact place.

Check out these photos from the day: 

Aside from the excursion we have been super busy in our classrooms. 

In Maths, we have continued on our place value journey and have also begun working with the four operations. The use of the lattice method and grid method have helped students to solve complex multiplication problems and we are sure that students are feeling confident enough to teach you these methods at home if you are interested.

In reading we have used picture books to explore character traits and enjoyed watching a short movie about a little mouse who wanted to be adopted.

Writing has been focused on our learning task and students are well on their way to finishing their adventure narratives. We are sure you are going to love reading them when they come home in their portfolios later this term. 

Check out the prompts below and see if you can guess which one your child may have opted for:

Inquiry continues to be focused on democracy and parliament. Surprisingly this has been an incredibly interesting and fun unit and the conversations classes have had have been amazing. 

In Science we are now looking deeper into each of the 5 biomes and this week we learnt a fun 'rap' from a camel about adaptation. If you too would like it stuck in your head for days, listen here: 

Have a wonderful fortnight and we look forward to updating you again soon. 

The Level 5/6 Team

Sam Younes, Mykaela Oakley, Megan Pepprell, Brendan Van Haaster, Alarna Creed and Ashleigh Wilson