In the Classrooms

Writing

All schools in the cluster are focusing on ideas in writing. We have previously looked at ideas but we will dive deeper into this topic.

First, we looked at the process of writing. This involves finding your own learning space in the room, being organised, brainstorming ideas, making a plan, doing a draft, editing, reviewing and publishing. Students will often jump straight into writing a story without brainstorming ideas or making a plan so we will really focus on these parts of writing as they are just as important as the story itself.

Each student has a copy of the sheet titled Planting Seeds which describes a range of brainstorming strategies for ideas. We have modelled some of these strategies with the students already so that they can decide which strategy works best for them when thinking about an idea for their writing. The strategies we have looked at so far are the 5 senses, heart map, thinking tree and venn diagram. For the 5 senses strategy we talked about what we hear, see, smell, taste and feel on the bus when we come to school. For the heart map we discussed people, places, moments and things that we love and for the thinking tree we chose the word tiger and thought of all the words that relate to tiger. For the venn diagram strategy, students worked in pairs and wrote down all their own likes and found the likes that they shared. After modelling a strategy with the whole class, we discussed how we can use that particular strategy to come up with our ideas for writing then students had a go at using that strategy with their own writing.

Once the students have brainstormed all their ideas they will choose one big idea to focus on then begin creating a draft.

Reading

We have started a new class text called ‘The Little Wave’ by Pip Harry. We started this text by getting students to make 3 different predictions. They predicted what the text would be about by looking at the front cover, then we read the blurb and they completed another prediction and they finished their last prediction after reading the first chapter. It was great to see the predictions become more detailed as the students learnt new information about the story and the characters. Our learning intention is that students will move from making general predictions using the information right in front of them to thinking deeper about the characters and the story to make more detailed predictions. Students have created their own goals for prediction in reading.

Foundation - Grade 1 students have been participating in guided reading sessions with the teachers and looking for certain words in their books. We have seen a great improvement in their familiarity with common words, their fluency with these books and their decoding skills with harder words.

Maths

Multiplication and division is our mathematics topic for this term. Foundation to Grade 1 students are practising their skip counting by 2’s as well as sharing concrete materials into groups to represent division and multiplication. Grade 2 to Grade 6 students are all practising their times tables. The tables that students learn first are the 1’s, 2’s, 5’s and 10’s as these are the easiest ones to learn. They then go on to learn their 3’s, 4’s, 6’s, 7’s, 8’s and 9’s. We have an ‘I Can’ wall in our Maths room that shows a scale of multiplication and division skills taken from the curriculum. We have used data from our essential assessment test to place students on this wall so they can see where they are at and what their next steps are.

Bluearth and Breakfast Club

Bluearth has now changed to a Friday morning from 9am-10am every second week. This is the time we usually have breakfast club which means there will be a slight change to how we run it. Breakfast club is a great opportunity for students to show teamwork when setting the room up and packing up at the end, as well as socialising in a different dynamic. Breakfast club will now be every second Friday on the weeks that we do not have Bluearth, however, on the weeks when we do have Bluearth we will do a lunch instead of breakfast.

Moyhu Primary School Newsletter

We are Learners, We are Respectful, We are Safe

Term 3 Week 2 · 20 Jul 2020

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