456 News

Within the English realm of Literacy, the 456 students have been reading a wide variety of persuasive texts, and whilst focusing on identifying the author's Purpose and Message, they have been fine-tuning their inferring skills, using both the clues that a text provides and their prior knowledge to answer questions.  This vital literacy component enriches their comprehension, and we are very proud to say that much progress has been made!    Within our writing workshop, students have begun writing persuasive texts.  The pre-writing stage of the process saw students creating seeds in their Writer's Notebooks related to the topic of 'things that really grind my gears.  We had fun with this seed. There were lots of laughs, and I must say.....the conversations were not just rich and plentiful but also highly informative!

In Numeracy, we have witnessed students' growing confidence to articulate their thinking when solving equations during our number talks and to solve division equations using a variety of strategies that differ from the traditional algorithm that many of us learned back in the day. Some strategies include 'multiplying up', 'sharing/dealing out' and repeated subtraction. Many students have reported a preference for the strategy they can use but can now confirm their answers with other methods of working out. It's sometimes a very robust discussion when we all get different solutions to equations, and it's great to see the students contributing to conversations respectfully. The students have all completed a pre-test for 'Fractions, Decimals and Percentages, and future learning will be planned accordingly.

We have also engaged in games-based activities supporting fluency in all basic operations this week. Working as a class, in pairs or individually, students learned new games such as 'Bingo', 'Wishball' (place value) 'Mischievous Monkey' (multiplication of 1 and 2-digit numbers; 2 and 3-digit numbers), 'Race to 100' (place value and addition), 'Greedy Pig' and 'Climb the Mountain' (addition and chance and data). Fun times to be had by all...and an excellent way to recover from the late nights!!

Reminders:

• 2023 Grade 6 Jumper and t-shirt orders ASAP, please (via Sentral)