Class Celebrations

Prep

The Prep students spent the first few weeks of school learning essential rules and routines. We have been impressed with how the students have transferred this learning into a more structured timetable. Whilst our days have to be somewhat flexible, a typical day in prep may look as follows:

Early Morning Work

Session 1: Phonics

Session 2: Reading

Session 3: Writing

Snack

Recess

Session 4: Maths

Session 5: Circle solutions/Inquiry

Lunch

Lunch Play

Home Time

We have been learning:

Phonics:

-Letters and Sounds for s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k

-How to segment words into sounds (c-a-t)

-How to blend sounds to read words (cat)

Reading:

-Caring for books

-Navigating a book (front cover, back cover)

-What a reading lesson looks/sounds like

-Choosing books I enjoy

Writing:

-Pencil grip

-Tracing

-Copying

-Identifying the difference between drawing and writing

-Identifying the difference between a letter/word/sentence

Maths:

-Identifying number 0 to 10 as numerals, words and collections

-Sequencing numbers 0 to 10

-Counting forwards and backwards to 10 

Other areas of learning

In Week 6, students took part in a ‘Snack Art’ workshop as part of their inquiry topic on Community. Students learnt how to be a healthy community member and were taught to identify superhero foods and zombie foods. They made their own healthy snack art as well as a superhero mask. It was wonderful to see students identifying superhero foods in their lunchboxes after the session!

Grade 1

Last week, Grade 1 were lucky to have four guest speakers from the community come to visit as part of our Inquiry learning about the community. We had Dan the doctor, Gab the paramedic, Ella the zoologist and Noam the engineer. The students were so engaged as they listened to our speakers talk about their jobs. Grade 1 also had the chance to ask them many questions, which they had written earlier in the week. One of our students thought the guest speakers were so clever they must have skipped some school grades! Our speakers said that they tried their best at school, never gave up and were able to do a job they love. We were so proud of how our students showed respect to the speakers and used their manners throughout the presentation.

Harmony Week

Wow! Our students looked fantastic when they wore their cultural clothing and the colour orange to celebrate Harmony Week. Our students loved reading books this week about people from different countries, writing about what makes them different and creating artworks with a Harmony Week theme.

Grade 2

This week the Grade 2s have been learning about Place Value in Maths. Students have been building their understanding of how numbers can be represented in our number system and have been working on being able to identify that value of each digit within a number. Students were able to show their understanding creatively by building their own model and explaining how the total number of MAB blocks they had used could be represented in different ways. 

Grade 3/4

This week we have been celebrating Harmony Week in class. On Thursday, we learnt about what diversity means and students were invited to share some information about their culture and where they were born. We then created a large map with each of our home countries flags to celebrate the many countries that make up our SMPS community.  Here are some images of our Grade 3/4s dressed in cultural dress or orange (the symbolic colour of harmony). We had such a fun day celebrating cultures, learning more about each other, and bonding as a cohort. 

Grade 5 and 6

The last two weeks have been a hive of activity in Grades 5 and 6! Students have been learning the following:

Reading

We have been reading Detention by Tristan Bancks in class. This book is about a child who escapes from an immigration detention centre, causes a school lockdown and leads to an epic chase. Through our novel study, we have been exploring characterisation, perspectives, cultural influences, the author's writing style and more. It has also linked strongly to Harmony Week.

Writing

Our writing lessons have had a split focus on grammar (particularly sentence structure and punctuation), along with skills specific to narratives. Students have written full narratives and also descriptions of characters and settings, ensuring that they include adjective, similes, metaphors, prepositional phrases, varied openers, and more.

Maths

Maths lessons have been focussed on understanding the basis of our number system, written methods for the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), angles and symmetry. For Harmony Week, students identified the lines of reflectional symmetry and the order of rotational symmetry in flags from different cultures.

Leadership

We are very proud of our school leaders. At assembly, we presented them with badges to recognise their responsibilities. Our leaders are:

• School Captains: Riley and Roshan
• Vice-Captains: Ally and Vianna
• Montague: Cohen and Gavin
• Normanby: Sai and Alexy
• Ferrars: Julian and Arushi
• Clarendon: Samanvi and Hayden
• Sustainability: Janya, Reefand, Will, Shaurya, Aarav, Kallan, Ava, Julie, Omkar.

Fun

It is not all hard work with no fun though. Both classes have been known to blow off some steam on Fridays through fun and games on the forecourt!