the Nor'Wester

school life 

Writing an Engaging Beginning – Unit JW 

 

The Senior Students have been working on creating engaging beginning for their creative writing. These are the different types of Leads the students were experimenting with:

  • Open with action.
  • Open with a question.
  • Open with an announcement.
  • Open with a bold statement.
  • Open with dialogue.
  • Open with a puzzle or riddle.
  • Open with a description of emotion or personal feeling.

Here are some examples of story beginnings from Unit JW, can you guess which type of lead each student was experimenting with?“Brooke leaned out of the side of the boat. In the corner of her eye, she saw something big and grey in the water. She turned around, and let out a scream that nearly deafened Maddy. “Th-there’s! A! A shark! A-a sh-sh-shark!! GET OUT OF THE WATER! QUICKLY!” Brooke tried you squeak out. Maddy barely heard her, but saw the massive shape. She scrambled towards the boat, and managed to get on. Brooke tried to pull her up, but it was no use. One second, everything was fine. The next, there was a plume of red in the water, and Maddy was gone.” – Georgia Breen“I’m riding as fast as I can into the woods, seeing an old underground bomb shelter I jump off my bike and try to open the hatch but it’s too stiff and I just quite can’t get it open. My leg is all scraped up because my bike chain got caught on it so I can’t get away in time. Panicking I desperately smack my bike against it and it unlatches. I quickly jump in and lock myself in then I realise something, I’m not alone in here.” – Marco Honegger“What’s big, heavy and doesn’t float? We answered that question the hard way. Us. We were stuck in our car at the bottom of a deep river after a big car crash. The water was starting to fill up our car. After 3 minutes of trying to get out I heard a loud rushing of water. I asked myself - what is at the end of this river?” – Ben Pickering “The plane stuttered. Its nose dipped towards the green hills and then it started to plummet, streaking towards the ground. I screamed, I think other people did too, but all I could hear was a pounding in my ears saying, you're going to die, you're going to die, you’re going to die, then the plane flipped, turned and landed the huge lake. Instantly water started seeping through the doors. I grabbed the door and tried to open it but it was jammed. The water was rising. I broke the window and water flooded in but I jumped out. I swam. When I thought I could swim no more and finally I felt sand under my feet. I looked for my friends and the other passengers but no one else was there. I was alone.” - Harriet Forge“

 

The massive ball of creamy white ice-cream rolled down the centre of the road leaving a sticky trail behind it. The neighbours’ Doberman, Bean, chased after the ball slurping up all melted ice-cream off the road.

 

The ice-cream kept rolling, destroying everything in its path. “AHHH!” I screamed as it started heading towards me. I knew there was nothing I could do about it, it always came back. 

 

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be in charge of the world? Sounds fun right? That’s what I thought but it did not turn out how I wanted it to. It all went horribly wrong. “  – Soma O’Sullivan

Milla Nowoisky

 

Indigenous Literacy Day

 

Next week Wednesday is Indigenous Literacy Day. Last year we celebrated and supported this by running a BNWPS ‘Great Book Swap’. Students were asked to bring a book to school to swap with a classmate. Even though things are different this year we are still hoping to contribute to this year's event.

 

This Wednesday we will have our own 'Great Book Share’ and deliver a book that we are happy to pass on to a friend, classmate, or neighbour during our family outdoor hour. Please make sure to sanitise the book and simply put it in their mailbox or on their doorstep (to make sure that we keep a safe distance from others when delivering it). 

 

The Book Share will be covered in this coming week's 'Wellbeing Wednesday' activity. The ‘book share’ is a way to 'bring us together while we stay apart’. It is also a great way to help care for the environment.♻️

 

Find out more about Indigenous Literacy Day: https://www.indigenousliteracyfoundation.org.au/indigenous-literacy-day

www.indigenousliteracyfoundation.org.au

 

Enviro Science 

BNWPS Storyathon 

 

There's one week until entries close for our BNWPS Storyathon.  

To enter, you need to write a microstory (that is exactly 100 words) on the theme, ‘Life in Lockdown’.  

This competition is open to all members of our school community. Stories can be written individually or as a family. 

Entries close on Friday 4th September. They can be emailed to: Emma.Mallia@education.vic.gov.au 

Stories will be judged by our Senior Student Literacy Leaders and the winners will be announced on BNWPS Radio.  Remember, there are prizes to be won! 

 

Maths

 

Hello BNW families! 

 

This week some of you may have heard Jessie and I on Education hour where we covered a range of different topics and answered questions asked by community members about maths. Some of the questions required a more detailed answer than what we could give on the radio, since we only had 1 hour, so there are some blog posts written to further explain some of the concepts that were asked. 

 

This blog post: http://bnwps.global2.vic.edu.au/2020/08/26/george-booker/ talks about a text book that all teachers at BNW use to help plan lesson sequences. I've included some scanned pages of the learning sequences for number, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and fractions for you to have a look at. 

 

This blog post: http://bnwps.global2.vic.edu.au/2020/08/26/strategies-for-addition-subtraction-multiplication-and-division/ gives you a brief overview of the strategies that we teach for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. They aren't in detail because it would take a while to explain them fully but there are a range of posters and youtube clips that describe the strategies. Feel free to Google them if you'd like to learn more about them or search for them on YouTube to see a video that demonstrates them. 

As always, there will be another maths challenge for next week that will be posted on the blog as well as the students who successfully solved this week's challenge.  We have been getting some lovely feedback about the maths challenges so thank you so much for that!