Normal:

Noun: the usual, typical, or expected state or condition.

This week we learned that we are taking the first step back to normal life after a marathon lockdown. And our school life continues to adapt to the COVID restrictions as they change according to health advice . But contrary to the above definition, there is nothing typical or expected about how our kids have responded to being back at school; they’re thriving! As we enter the final stretch of the school year, we are also preparing for our annual production, reports are being written, and our days are crammed with learning and fun. Here is your weekly peek into the world of the far from normal classrooms of the kids of BBPS.

Oh, and check out the Tawny Frogmouth who generated much curiosity and excitement when it visited our prep playground this week!

Prep

Prep classrooms are full of trolls, beaches and reflections on the weekend as our students learn about division and multiplication, words of the week and writing about their experiences. Investigations (also known as developmental play) continues to be a highlight of the day.

Toby (Prep E): “I learned a lot of words of the week. The new word is beach and I made my beach at home and then I found out the new word of the week was also beach. We are making a beach out of a paper plate. We also made spikey head trolls. They like to be with their friends and they all have to have the same number of spikes for their hair, so we had to share the spikes”

Lottie (Prep E): “Yesterday I did writing. We did writing about what happened on the weekend. I wrote about going to the beach and seeing my friend there. We also drew pictures about our investigations play”

Grades one and two are enjoying learning about money, rhyming words and in art they are getting stuck into pottery. We popped into 12C, where the class have been making items for their shop, including dresses, jack-o-lanterns and fruit. We swung by art and saw enthusiastic potters making aliens out of clay and dropped into PE to see 2V complete a beep test.

Sarayu (1W) “In art we are making aliens out of clay. It is a bit tricky but it is fun too”

Luke (2V) “We did a beep test. When you start you have to run all the way to the other end before it beeps. I did the max level that I can do. In grade 3 we will do a harder beep test”

Grades 3 and 4

In Mathematics, Years 3 and 4 have been looking at fractions and time and in English they have been sharing their opinions through their persuasive writing skills.

Ariel (3B): We are finding information for persuasive writing. One of the topics we looked at was ‘There Should be no Homework’. For example, one reason is that when children come home after learning all day they need to relax”

Thomas 3B): for fractions, we had a black line and we then had yellow pieces of a certain length. We had to see how many yellow pieces would fit next to the black line”

We visited 4D and asked them if there were any interesting facts that they didn’t know before this week. Here are two:

Annabelle “I learned that Queensland has a different time zone”

Yuvi “I found out there are 3600 seconds per hour”

Grades 5 and 6

Year 5 students are persevering with learning their times tables, but doing it fun ways.

Money Mayhem! Grades 6 have been looking at income, and budgets. They’re getting ready to spend (your) money (wisely).

In English, both 5 and 6 students have been looking at vocabulary.

And everyone has also been busy practicing for the production. The current focus has been on their dance moves.

We visited 5C where some students were playing “flipper and the brain”, a game using a deck of cards which is popular across the school.

Demi “We take turns. One person is the flipper and they flip the cards, and the other person is the brain. That person multiplies the card that has been flipped by using the times table they have been working on”

Maya “It is fun and it is also good practice”

In 6C students were working on ways to improve their writing by choosing synonyms that had different levels of intensity or “shades of meaning”.

Will “We got given a base word. We then had to find synonyms”

Ruby “ We then had to put our words in order according to intensity, based on how ‘deep’ the word is”

Library News

Tawny frogmouth in the tree in Exon