Senior School Learning

Year 3 and 4

Traffic Investigation in year 3 and 4 Maths

In the Senior School, the 3/4’s have been focusing on data collection and graphing. Last week the students did a traffic investigation where they watched the traffic drive (and walk) past the school and recorded the information in their workbooks. After the investigation, we discussed the data and created graphs about how many vehicles went past the school. It was great to see the students interacting and helping one another collect data. 

Year 5 and 6

Reading: Students have been exploring many different texts, of varying genres. We have used these texts to make predictions about what we have read. Students have enjoyed watching videos, reading their independent reading book and reading kidsnews.com articles to make their predictions. We use the information in the text, along with our schema (our backpack of knowledge) to predict before we read and while reading. We are then able to check whether our predictions are correct or not. 

Writing: Have you ever wondered how watching movies can help with our writing? Well they can! This week, students have been focusing on how they can write stories that will engage the reader right from the beginning. We have watched the start of movies and discussed how they make us interested and draw us in, wanting us to watch more. This is their sizzling start! Students have created their own sizzling starts for their writing, aiming to create a movie in the reader’s mind that will engage them right from the start, leaving them wanting more! What are some of your favourite movie beginnings?

We have also worked a lot with our sound chart and focused on our Short Vowel sounds. Students have been working hard to identify words with the short ‘e’ sound, as well as the short ‘I’ sound. They have really tried to find more difficult words in their independent reading books as well as using their schema. We have seen lots of phoneme fists being used in the classroom which has been great to see. Almost looks like a creative game of rock, paper, scissors. 

Maths: This week we have moved on to factors and multiples. It has been an interesting conversation to have with students as they make new discoveries. They have discovered that prime numbers (something they learnt a few weeks ago) only have 2 factors, whilst even numbers will have many more factors. We have discussed how skip counting can help us to find multiples and also the link between factors and multiples. Maybe you can have a discussion about the lowest common factor of 2 and 3...

Performing Arts

This term our highlights have been:  being mime artists, learning how to work effectively in a small group, incorporating new and fun settings in our scenes, playing the bean game, learning improvisation games such as What Are You Doing and Spacejump and learning how to perform unique characters.