What's happening in our learning spaces? 

tudents of the Week   

Foundation

What a busy week it has been in Foundation yet again, as we engaged in our first full week of school together since returning to school after lockdown! We engaged in many exciting learning tasks this week and made lots of new discoveries! 

As mathematicians, we tuned in to the concept of Multiplication. We began exploring multiplication by looking for groups in real life and sorting objects into small groups. We focused on what a group is, how many groups we had and how many items were in each group, and then as thinkers, used concrete materials and drawings to represent equal groups in real life, such as 4 bunnies with 2 ears and 3 ponds with 4 frogs.  

As part of our Discovery Time workshops, we continued to develop our skills as  designers, communicators and collaborators. As self-managers, we set personal goals as to how we would be better collaborators and communicators this week as we engaged in our small groups to find out, design, solve problems and create. We focused on brainstorming and thinking about what we were going to do and coming up with a plan in our groups before designing and making, as we engaged in creating our own shops, book making, block construction and architecture. This is all part of the design process! As thinkers, we were curious about all of the different Australian Animals and shared our wonderings with one another. As researchers, some of us read different information texts and some of us were assisted to gather new information online through different websites. 

As part of our inquiry about designing and making for a purpose, we continued to collaborate with our groups to build a new house for the Three Little Pigs that was strong and stable, large enough for all three pigs and that protected them from the weather, such as wind and rain. After constructing our houses, we engaged in the final steps of the design process and had time and opportunity to test and improve our designs. We used a checklist and made sure our houses had a door and a window, fit all three pigs comfortably and protected the pigs from different types of weather. We looked for gaps and faulty doors and windows and improved some of our houses by making some changes and adding or removing things. Afterwards, we tested them when the Big Bad Wolf (in the form of a pedestal fan), came for a visit and tried to blow our houses down. Our houses were all a success and were strong and stable enough to stop the wolf from blowing it down! 

We ended the week with Crazy Sock Day, where we raised money and awareness for children in Thailand. We began the day with a check in circle, and had time and opportunity to share our thoughts and feelings about the day ahead and the week that was. As mathematicians, we lined up all of the money we donated and applied our knowledge of measurement to measure the length of the coins. We used informal units and estimated how many blocks long we thought it would be, before collaborating to measure and record our findings. Our coin line was 50 unifix blocks long! We even designed our own crazy socks, making sure they were whacky, colourful and creative, and had a dance party. Our day ended with a virtual ACMI incursion in Fairy Tale Land, where as researchers, we found out about Fairy Tales. We explored settings, heroes and villains and began planning our very own fairy tale with magical creatures and objects. This week, we will have time and opportunity to write our stories. 

We are excited for another full week of learning ahead. 

Foundation Team, Leanne Wenckowski and Alycia Marsico.

Year 1/2

We welcomed back our first full week of learning and we all agree that nothing beats face-to-face and learning in a classroom! We welcome A.C.U. student Clare Manthos to the Year One/Two team. Clare will be spending her placement in 1/2MD for the next four weeks.  If the name sounds familiar... yes, Clare is Ms Di’s daughter!

As readers, we have been reading fiction with ongoing themes of design.  This marries well with our Shared Inquiry unit for this term.  The focus is on building comprehension and strategies such as:

• Making connections using prior knowledge
• Predicting
• Visualising
• Asking and answering questions
• Summarising

As writers, we are continuing to learn more about the different types of authors’ purpose:

• To inform
• To entertain

We are unpacking the language structures and language features of these text types. The students are really enjoying and engaging in writing time using the framework of writers’ notebook.  They are becoming confident writers through their own treasured writers’ notebook. 

As Mathematicians, we have begun to explore fractions.  We know that when something is broken up into a number of parts, the fraction shows how many of those parts you have. We cut up an apple into 4 equal parts to show ½, ¼, ¾ .  We used pictures to sort those that were equal parts and those that were not equal parts.

We had a great Maths lesson estimating, sorting and counting the money brought in for 

‘Crazy Socks Day’. 

Through exploration of different local, national and global garden designs, the students’ curiosity has been triggered and they will use their thinking skills to plan ahead and design a garden for various parts of our school.  The students in 1/2BF will design a garden model for the area near the junior school entrance on Hawthorn Yard.  The students in 1/2SC will be designing a garden model for the S.L.A and 1/2MD will be focusing on the front entrance garden.  The learning assets will be well and truly utilised as the students establish their roles in their groups and collaboratively plan and design their garden space. We can’t wait to see their designs!

The students were very excited to commence our Discovery Learning on Tuesday and Wednesday.  No words are needed to describe the learning assets in action here...

On Thursday we gathered, prayed and stopped to observe a minute’s silence to commemorate those who died in war.  The students made rosemary badges using sprigs from our Discovery Garden and proudly wore them throughout the day. 

What an amazing day we had on Crazy Sock Day!  Thanks Ms Sally for organising such a wonderful day for us!

Have a wonderful week with your beautiful families!

Kindest regards,

Year 1/2 Team,

Stephanie Carriera, Belinda Filippone and Maria Delaney

Year 3/4

It has been a busy week for the 3/4 students at St. Fidelis and it hasn’t taken long to pick up from where we left off by quickly settling back into old routines and new ones (e.g, mask wearing). The students have continued to enjoy each others company and to be positive and resilient learners. 

This week in 3/4KD we welcomed our student teacher, Isabella Frazzetto. It has been wonderful to meet Isabella and we look forward to working with her over the coming weeks. 

On Thursday the 11th of November we commemorated Remembrance Day as a school community. We made poppies and wore them with pride as a sign of respect to remember. We learnt that the purple poppy is often worn to remember animals that have been victims of war. We used the See, Think, Wonder thinking routine to unpack a variety of historical War Images. As thinkers, we reflected upon the meaning and importance of Remembrance Day. 

On Friday the 12th November we celebrated Socktober for Mission Month. We all came to school wearing colourful and crazy socks and we brought coins to raise money for Catholic Mission. It was a fun day for everyone with dance parties and fun activities. We created a coin trail by placing all our coins in a line and we estimated the length of our coin trail and then measured it. Then each class counted the total amount of money they raised.

As mathematicians, we have continued exploring division. In 3/4 we are becoming experts at solving division worded problems and equations using a variety of strategies, such as repeated subtraction, skip counting, arrays, fact families and the inverse operation (multiplication). 

As writers, we have been writing explanation texts. An explanation text is factual writing that tells how something works or why something happens. 3/4GT closely observed the working parts of a bicycle and used their observations and knowledge to write an explanation text on how a bicycle works. In 3/4MM and 3/4KD we focused our writing on explaining the process of the water cycle and earthquakes. 

This week in STEM  all the 3/4 classes are going on an excursion (on Wednesday the 17th November) to ACMI to participate in a Stop Motion Start Up Workshop. We are very excited about discovering the animation process. As collaborators, we will create our own visually engaging stop-motion animation in a team. 

We are looking forward to another week of exciting and engaging learning!

Year 3/4 Team, 

Katarina Davidson, Mark MacGregor, Graham Troy 

Year 5/6

The Year 5/6 students relished the opportunity to be back for the first full week since August! The students were so excited to finally see Mrs Casamento face to face! It had been such a long time!  

In Reading, the students finished the last 3 chapters of the text they have been studying, the ‘39 Clues: Maze of Bones” by Rick Riodan. The premise of “The Maze of Bones'' was dramatic and instantly engaging, with students drawn to the twists in the plot, the devious nature of Dan and Amy’s relatives and the excitement of the hunt.  In a story promoting resilience, courage, sibling connectedness and cooperation, students followed Amy and Dan’s adventures, travel and hairbreadth escapes, interspersed with the odd historical anecdote, and they learnt that every single famous or influential person of the past few centuries has been a member of the Cahill family.  In this story we learnt about Benjamin Franklin, and at the conclusion of the first book, we learn Amy and Dan are off to Venice to investigate the next clue that has connections to the historical figure “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.”  

Breaking into spontaneous applause at the conclusion of this book, it is safe to conclude that all students thoroughly enjoyed the adventure story. They were buzzing with theories and predictions of what the next book will behold at the conclusion of the book. It was wonderfully satisfying, as teachers, to see the students so engaged and making ‘text to world’ and ‘text to text’ connections, whilst identifying the relevance of the important details they had previously highlighted.  Many students pledged they will be seeking out the next installment of the thrilling mystery adventure, (some hadn’t been able to contain their excitement and had started reading the next book already!)  The love and thirst for reading is exactly what the Year 5/6 teachers had hoped to achieve and we are thrilled they enjoyed the race around the world to find cryptic clues to a mysterious fortune. We will read the second book in class for fun over the next 4 weeks, however, a top tip for Christmas this year might be a book from the series under the Christmas tree. 

In Writing, the students continued exploration of the differences between simple, compound and complex sentences. This week, students completed an author study on Jeannie Baker through her exquisite books Circle, Home in the Sky and Mirror.  Using the books as a guide, students identified the important features of the narrative genre and commenced their own narrative using various sentence starters such as:

• I found a strange package by the door…
• Brrrringggg! I answered the phone and…
• There was an octopus in my pool…
• The rhino was following me to the…
• He had been squished flatter than a pancake…
• I heard an explosion in the science lab…
• The rain was pouring down…

Students also formatted their Self Reflection on their Learning Assets of their semester of learning for their reports. 

On Thursday, students participated in a very reverent whole school assembly marking Remembrance day.  Students watched a BTN report based on the important concepts of  WW1 and Armistice day, Remembrance day history and its significance today, the reason we pause at 11am on 11th Nov, and the significance and symbolism of Poppies. Many important discussions occurred as a result.  Students created their own poppies and listened to the last post, whilst exploring why this bugle song  is used in services today. 

Students read the moving picture story book “ Midnight: The Story of a Light Horse” that detailed the true story of the light horsemen in the war. They were able to choose from a variety of factual, creative or inference activities as a personal response to the text.  

In Numeracy, the students commenced their topic on fractions.  Fractions can be a challenging topic for all students, however students realised the importance of denominators, numerators and their position on a number line.  Students created fraction walls with concrete materials, reinforcing the concept that the larger the denominator the smaller the fraction. We will continue working on this concept over the next few weeks. 

In Religion, students continued to explore how we are all connected in the quest for justice for the poor.   Students set themselves a personal challenge ‘How will I live and act out love and compassion?’ Next week we will begin our Advent unit, where we explore the importance of Advent for Christians as a period of waiting and preparing for our messiah, Jesus Christ.

Continuing with the concepts of ‘Ethical Consumerism’ and our role as responsible consumers in Inquiry, students looked at the concepts of being an entrepreneur.  Through the viewing of various Shark Tank pitches, students identified the product or service the entrepreneur was selling, the persuasive techniques they used to try to get people to buy their product/service and whether their pitch/ technique was successful. Students explored the dispositions entrepreneurs have and explored companies, such as Coke and Nike, in order to make more ethically conscious choices when making purchases.  Finally, in small groups of 3,  they started to design a product that could be used to help our community. They were encouraged to explore the concepts of how their product would be ethical and sustainable? What would the consumer need to know about the product? What would they need (materials) to create a prototype?  What is the cost to purchase the materials/ to create their prototype? How much will they sell it for? Who is their target Audience? Packaging? And how are they going to advertise their product? 

Finally, Crazy Sock Friday was a day full of fun and wellbeing.  After a beautiful prayer ceremony, students eagerly competed in a friendly ‘Coin Trial’ competition, where they lined up all the coins they had brought in to donate to charity. Each class eagerly lined up their donated coins and estimated the length of the coin trail. Once estimations had finalised, students accurately measured the lines with 1m rulers.  Year 5/6VC students' line was just over 9m, Year 5/6CF was just over 19m and the champion was Year 5/6OS with a tad over 20m.  It was a great deal of fun and allowed students to live their Christian mission, connecting to their learnings this term on assisting the poor.  Students subsequently counted their class money in small groups, with Year 5/6CF class winning the school competition with the most money raised totalling $126.60.  A wonderful effort by the whole St Fidelis community raising over $800! 

Crazy Sock puppets were also created and the students relished the opportunity to ‘interact’ with each other using crazy puppet voices from their creations.  We had everything from Eminim Rapstar to a Dinosaur, crazy ducks to beaded, feathered monsters and beautifully bowed puppets.  Overall, it was wonderful to hear the laughter, fun and genuine connection between friends and the students enjoyed the day.  It is summed up by Aseop’s quote “Gratitude turns what we have into enough.” 

We look forward to another great week of learning ahead and the excitement that Term 4 brings. 

Year 5/6 Team,

Cherrie Arnold, Olivia Sargent, Viviana Clarke and Michelle Casamento