Foundation - Learning Snapshot

What a wonderful Week 10 we’ve had in the Foundation community. A highlight for the children was the ‘Wedding’ where we celebrated Miss Langley’s last day with a mock wedding. We wish Miss Langley and her husband to be Mr Small all the happiness this Saturday as they celebrate their wedding day.

Just a reminder to take the time to look at PAM there are four assessment tasks that you can access. We ask that you sit with your child and view the assessment task together. We are very proud of their achievements and have no doubt you will enjoy celebrating your child’s success. Please take the time to read your child’s feedback and we ask that you read through your child’s goal in order to assist your child’s learning journey moving forward.

Next week will be very busy. We will be celebrating Holy Week, completing a variety of activities to develop our understanding starting with Palm Sunday and ending on Holy Thursday. Students will also be completing tasks highlighting the importance of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

On Friday afternoon student’s will witness the Easter Raffle draw. Please return your raffle tickets to ensure you have a chance to win one of the wonderful prizes. Thank you to all the families who have donated items to make the raffle a success. Good luck to everyone with tickets!

We are all very excited to have an opportunity to enjoy a sporting event at school. On Monday 4th April we will participate in our School Cross County. Students can wear their house colours for this event. Today in your child’s reading bag you will find a slip of paper that outlines your child’s house colour.

Please remember that we have an early dismissal time of 2:15 pm on the last day of Term One.

Have a great weekend and we look forward to our last five days together for Term One.

Bre Levesque, Sarah Langley & Lijarna Bekirofski (Foundation Teachers)

Junior Learning Community

It was wonderful to finally welcome parents into our classrooms for the Learning Conversations over the past week. Thank you to all who attended. The children were extremely excited at the prospect of their families seeing their work and classrooms so we were thrilled that we were able to meet and engage with you all. This was a great opportunity to discuss how your children have settled and share some of the things we, as teachers, have noted about your child’s learning. We look forward to continuing many conversations as we will hopefully be able to welcome you more into the school next term.

The past fortnight has been marked with two significant cultural events for the children of St Luke’s. Harmony Day provided an opportunity for children to share their cultures and cultural dress. It was wonderful to see all the children proudly celebrating their heritage and the harmonious relationship of cultures at St Luke’s. 1/2 Mercuri and 1/2 Monk connected the theme of Harmony to their assembly prayer performance. They read, sang and danced beautifully! The students of 1/2 Moodie and 1/2 Jondahl will connect the theme of Kindness to their assembly prayer this week.

On Wednesday, our students witnessed a beautiful Fire Carrier ceremony. We were privileged to see our Year 6 Fire Carriers take part in a traditional Aboriginal Smoking Ceremony. This was an extremely special event and something that we were able to reflect upon within our meditation and Religious Education sessions throughout the week.

The learning highlight for the fortnight, for both teachers and students, would have to be the construction of our Inquiry Ongoing Assessment. Students were given the opportunity to freely create their own Recipe for a Successful Learner, which was then either filmed as a cooking show, recorded as a podcast or published as a poster. The results of this assessment are truly ones to look out for on PAM as we are sure many parents will be blown away by their child’s performances (as we were).

With the continued introduction of the iPads, we have begun a unit on cyber safety and the appropriate use of technology. This will be an ongoing conversation and learning intention as we continue to expand our ICT use within our classrooms.

Within Writing we have been working on the use of synonyms and how we may predict text. Reading has focussed around the concept of ‘Reading on’ for difficult or unknown words, a skill that we hope children will carry on as they continue to read over the upcoming holidays.

Mathematics has given opportunity for the exploration of play within learning as we have been investigating both 2D and 3D shapes. The children have constructed shapes using play dough, matchsticks and used the iPads to go on their own ‘shape hunts’. This has been a fun topic which we believe many children have enjoyed.

As we prepare for the end of term break we will spend some time in the upcoming week revising what we have learned over the term. Children will take part in cross country on Monday, an event which we are all looking forward to.

Thank you for all that you are doing and continue to do at home to aid your child’s learning. We look forward to another great week. Thank you to all the children for a wonderful term.

Have a great weekend,

Junior Teachers.

Middle Learning Community

Its hard to believe we are almost at the end of the first term! Reflecting on the term it's amazing to think how far the students have come and the success they have achieved.

Over the past week, students have diligently worked to create a persuasive letter to convince their intended audience to agree with their point of view. We apologise in advance for the strongly worded letters outlining why your child believes they must have a pet, go on a holiday or have a sleepover with a friend!

This week we gathered as a 3/4 Unit to celebrate some of the fantastic achievements we have experienced over the first term. We also reinforced that it is important to finish off the term well, by following the school expectations and thinking about our actions before reacting.

In week 11 we will focus on…

Reading-

In reading, we will continue to develop our skills of summarising fiction and nonfiction texts. The model students will continue to use to summarise fiction texts is the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then model. To summarise a nonfiction text, students identified the key information from a text to include in a 5-6 sentence summary.

Writing-

Throughout the term, the 3/4 students have focused on the writing genres recount, narrative and persuasive. This coming week, students will have an opportunity to select a seed idea from their Writer’s Workshop book as inspiration for a writing piece of their choice.

SMART Spelling-

In Spelling, students will focus on words that contain the digraph ‘ear’ as in dear. Students are becoming increasingly familiar with the SMART spelling process and its pleasing to see students confidently using the language graph, digraph and trigraph when discussing their words.

Numeracy-

In Numeracy, students will continue to focus on the mathematical concept time. Over the next week, students will continue to develop their knowledge of reading analogue clocks, converting minutes to seconds, the amount of days in each month and to read a calendar.

Religious Education-

In Religious Education, students will continue to learn about the significance of Palm Sunday, The Last Supper, Jesus Prays in the Garden, Jesus Arrested, the Crucifixion and the rise of Jesus.

Senior Learning Community

It was wonderful to see so many parents face to face for parent teacher interviews this week. The teachers in 5/6 all relished the opportunity to talk about your child/ren and their learning, as they are at the centre of everything we do. We are all busy finishing off our Inquiry unit, with students creating videos about how to be successful. Hopefully the messages learnt in this unit will stick with the students throughout the year as they endeavour to - 'do their best' and 'be their best.'

Harmony Day & Buddies

Last week was Harmony Day. The students were encouraged to wear orange or their cultural clothing. Around the school we saw some brilliant examples of cultural clothing and/or bright orange colours! Some of the classes also completed some fun activities to acknowledge Harmony Day. The year 5/6 classes made lotus flowers! The lotus flowers had strong words that describe Harmony Day and what it is. We also watched some videos highlighting acceptance and celebration of all cultures. At Assembly, 1/2 Monk and 1/2 Mercuri lead prayer and sang the song, “I am Australian,” to acknowledge Harmony Day and unity.

By Mikayla, Claudia, Devon.

Harmony Day was the best! We spent time with our amazing buddies. We had a dance festival going on, and our buddies, - I'll tell you what, - they were amazing dancers! All our buddies had an excellent time hanging out. I don’t know anyone else that were better dancers than our cool Foundation students.

By Isaac.

Last week the year 5/6’s and Foundation students got to do some amazing dancing with their buddies! Some of the students showed us some cultural dances. They were fabulous! Then the year 5/6’s taught their buddies some traditional dances, such as the Nutbush and the Chicken Dance.

By Mikayla, Claudia and Devon

Homework

Many parents asked about homework during Parent Teacher Interviews. It is expected that students read each night for 10-20 min and write this into their diary and have their parents or guardians sign this. Students are also encouraged to practice spelling words that they receive each week. For Numeracy, students may like to use https://www.timestables.com/. This is a terrific tool for students to practice and learn times tables. As we head into holidays, and many of you may be going away, this is also a fantastic idea to include co-incidental and real life maths. Ideas could include cooking and measuring, following a timetable, planning a trip, reading a clock, purchasing using money and calculating change.

W.A.L.T.

Literacy: Persuasive Writing - finding out about and using persuasive devices.

Numeracy: 24 hour time, reading timetables and schedules.

Religion: The Risen Christ, focusing on the emotions of those who were witness to the passion.

Inquiry: Bringing all our knowledge of how to be successful together into a video presentation.

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