Seniors

This Term has well and truly flown! It is week 7 already, students (and teachers) can see the summer holidays approaching. We would like students to think about all they have achieved this year and set themselves a goal for the remainder of the year to finish strong.

In Literacy students are in the middle of unit focused around poetry. They have been immersed and exposed to a range of poetry and have been experimenting with the figurative language. Students have been working on creating their own poetry using their knowledge and understanding of how poetry is structured. They will continue to challenge their writing by linking narrative writing and poetry.

In Inquiry and Religion, students have started a new unit on Social Justice. They have begun to look a real world issues and generate ideas of how to solve these problems. Students have been encouraged to think deeper and come up with thought provoking questions. They have also worked in collaboration with their peers to understand other people’s perspectives. Students will continue to look at Social Justice Issues and what we can do to help people in need.

Good luck to the students who are participating in the Triathlon this week!

Have a lovely week,

The Senior Team,

Anne-Marie, Louise, Stephen and Sally

Middles

The term is flying along and we are a busy level. Students have been working hard writing biographies, reading with expression in Reader’s Theatre, continuing their work on Number and 2D and 3D shapes and learning all about the Geography of our country and world in Inquiry.

We are enjoying the sunshine and better weather and looking forward to the school fete, which is coming quickly!!

Reading

We have completed our ‘Author Study’ on Oliver Jeffers and were delighted in how engaged the students were during this unit of work. A lot of Jeffer’s work is based around sustainability and the environment, so these texts were a great lead in to our Inquiry unit on Geography.

Writing

Students have been busy compiling their biographies. They have created interview questions, conducted their interviews and are now drafting and publishing their work. We look forward to sharing these biographies with you in the next week or so.

Maths

In Maths we are finishing up our work on 2D and 3D shapes. Students have focused on counting edges, faces and corners of these shapes. We are moving on to a unit around problem solving. This will allow students to work on a variety of areas of Mathematics as well as their comprehension skills.

R.E.

Miss Carla continues to take us on a journey through the Holy Land (which she took with St Mary’s staff members last year). Her first hand experiences in these locations has been invaluable to the student’s learning. We enjoyed our excursion to the Jewish Museum and Synagogue in St Kilda as well as St Patrick’s Cathedral in East Melbourne. The students are to be commended on their engagement and behaviour. We received feedback from both locations saying how well our students behaved. We look forward to continuing our learning around Jesus’ life as a First Century Jew.

Inquiry

Our Inquiry Immersion sessions have finished up. Students participated in a range of activities including learning about continents, longitude and latitude, the layers of the earth and distances to different countries in the world. We now move onto the Building phase where students will learn about the geography of our world with explicit, teacher directed lessons.

Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to seeing families at the school fete in a couple of short weeks!

All the best

Tania, Carla, Jarrod, Vicki and Sophia

Juniors

It has been fabulous to see the effort our students have made preparing for and presenting story-time for their class. It has been so lovely to see them confidently present to their peers.

It has been a ‘testing’ time for our students as we prepare end of year reports. Our students have been completing a range of tests in Mathematics and English. We are very proud of their performance and efforts.

Mathematics

In Mathematics we are focusing on Patterns and Algebra. Students have been engaged in different activities such as: creating their own object and number patterns, finding the missing numbers and looking for number patterns.

English

We are continuing to learn about narratives, in particular, fairy tales. Students have been planning and writing their own version of a fairy tale. We encourage parents to share their memories of childhood fairytales and folktales.

Inquiry

We are now at the the Personalising Stage of the Learning Process of our Inquiry, “Up, Down and All Around”. Students are beginning to conduct research to answer their “thick” questions. They are keen to learn more about landmarks found around the world, climate change, locating geographical features on a map and animal hibernation and migration.

Religion

We are continuing our exploration of The Bible. Students have been listening to and reading Parables with a special focus on the Good Samaritan. They are learning that Jesus shared Parables with his followers to help them learn how to treat each other and our world.

Other

Thank you to our families for registering in CareMonkey. If you haven’t yet, please do so as we have an excursion coming up later in the term and there will be no paper permission forms.

Have a fabulous week and stay cool!

Kind Regards

Renee & Tania, Bethany, Jason, Naomi & Tracey.

Seniors

Congratulations to Tom, Hannah and Jennifer from the Senior school who participated in the Regional Athletics last week. We are very proud of your achievements and wish Tom good luck as he progresses to the next stage.

In Maths we have begun our unit on Angles, where the students have completed a pre-test and have set learning goals. Students will work to achieve their personal learning goals by engaging in a range of learning opportunities to better understand Angles. Students are encouraged to use the Google slides that have been provided for them to keep track of their learning and practise skills at home.

In Literacy the students will begin a unit on Poetry. The students have started exploring similes, metaphors and personification. Ask your children if they can give you an example.

In Inquiry the students are working on their personalising stage of our Sustainability and Science unit. They have been working in groups or independently to think about their big question that relates to an issue in our environment. Students are working on the research stage of the Inquiry process and aim to present their learning in the coming weeks.

Just a reminder that a notice went home with the students, asking for donations for the schools fete. Please have a look at the notice and if you are able to donate something, that would be much appreciated.

Have a lovely week,

The Senior Team,

Anne-Marie, Louise, Stephen and Sally

Preps

Hi Prep families,

We have had a busy fortnight in Prep filled with lots of wonderful learning experiences.

In English, we have been reading lots of different narratives to help inspire ideas for writing our own stories. The Preps have been working hard to identify the characters, setting and plot in the narratives we are reading as a class. Over the next fortnight the Preps will attempt to create their own characters, setting and plot for their own narrative. We have also explored using adjectives in our writing to help make our stories more interesting.

In Maths, this fortnight we have been learning about location and positional language. The Preps needed to use their visualisation and estimation skills in order to program the Beebots (a programmable floor robot) to move to a desired location. It has been pleasing to see the Preps working together to solve their maths problems. In the next coming weeks we will be revisiting different strategies we can use to help us solve addition problems as well as beginning work on measurement.

During Religion, we have been learning about Jesus’ Baptism and relating this back to stories of our own Baptism or the Baptism of people we know. The Preps have also been looking at the different symbols of Baptism and the meaning of them.

Thank you to all the parents who volunteered to come along on our excursion. The Preps had a wonderful day exploring food from the Vietnamese culture and enjoyed tasting some new traditional dishes. We have continued learning about different cultures around the world, as well as our Australian Indigenous culture.

Please remember that all children need to be wearing their hats at Recess and Lunch, as we have a “no hat, not play” policy. As we are encouraging independence, it is the responsibility of the Prep children to look after their own hats and make sure they keep them safe.

Have a great week.

Amanda, Hayley and Jane.

St Mary's School

Issue 19 · 21 Nov 2019

In this issue