Icarus Community Report

 

A message from the Icarus teachers 

It’s been an exciting time in the Icarus 5/6 community this year settling into our new portable classrooms! We have been getting to know the students in our Mentor groups and from next week we will start our Literacy and Numeracy groups. 

We would like to congratulate all of the students who applied for a student leadership position. Getting up in front of your teachers and peers can be daunting and we were impressed so many students had a go and spoke with confidence about what qualities they would bring as a student captain. We congratulate our new School Captains Ammar and Baani, Vice Captains Kendra and Shahmir and the many other students selected as  House Captains and Specialist Captains. We look forward to presenting students with their leadership badges soon and for them to commence their roles. 

Our Learning

Literacy

We have been completing Reading and Writing activities this Term with an emphasis on Narratives. The mentor texts that we have focused on to find examples of punctuation, adjectives, imagery devices, and other powerful writing features have been narratives.

We have looked at how narratives can be structured around an Orientation, a Complication, a Climax, a Resolution and a Conclusion. This structure is often called a Story Mountain. 

Students have examined mentor texts such as well-known folktales and fairytales to analyse which scenes correspond to this structure. 

We have planned and drafted the writing of our own engaging narratives using:

• a plan
• simple and compound sentences
• imagery devices, including figurative language
• powerful punctuation
• interesting vocabulary

Maths

In the first few weeks of Term 1 we have looked at Place Value and the Base 10 number system in Mathematics. 

This has involved reading numbers from millions to hundredths, writing numbers in words, ordering numbers, making numbers using MAB and identifying the value of each digit in a number. It has also been great to learn Maths through games such as; Maths Tiggy and Yahtzee.

SEL 

Our focus in our Social and Emotional Learning has been putting things in context when they go wrong. We created our own ‘catastrophe scales’ that ranked problems according to severity. For instance, we would rank running late for school much lower on the catastrophe scale than falling over and injuring yourself. This helps us regulate our own emotions when dealing with setbacks because we can place them in context with other setbacks.

Another focus has been on developing our growth mindset. Instead of saying ‘this is too hard’ we remind ourselves that we are all learners, and say ‘I haven’t learnt this 

yet, but I will’. We imagine ourselves in a learning pit that we need to move through for learning to occur, so it is okay if some parts are challenging or even frustrating for us.

Inquiry 

This term the question guiding our Inquiry focus is the resilience-building topic of ‘How can I be the best version of me?’ We are learning about how to develop a growth (positive) mindset, how to be organised, stay safe and how to deal with problems that arise. 

We will build on what qualities we each have and how we can develop these further. One quality that we have been working on is collaborating through fun group tasks - such as our cup stacking challenge, and cooperative team games such as Golden Ball (our new favourite class game!)

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact your child’s Mentor Teacher via the Compass app or call or email the school office to make a time to meet with teachers.

Students have been each allocated a school diary to take home. We encourage parents and guardians to regularly check this.

Kind regards, 

5/6 Icarus teachers, 

Lisa, Paul, Amber and Ainsley