A Spotlight on Learning 

A Spotlight on Learning in the SLC on Heights Campus

The return to school and Term 3 has happened seamlessly. Students in the Senior Learning Centre have arrived refreshed and ready to buckle down with their learning. After the excitement of camp towards the end of last term, making new friends and developing their resilience and confidence, this term promises to be full of hard work and even more wonderful learning opportunities.

The SLC students have started learning to apply multiplicative thinking skills in Mathematics. They are developing their skills to multiply a range of numbers and use a variety of strategies to solve problems.  Students are focused on being able to articulate the concept of renaming. The concept that 10 ones is 1 ten is being embedded by repetition and explanation over time. In the same way that 10 tens are 1 hundred when renaming into the hundreds column. It is not just carrying the “one” but renaming the 10 ones as 1 ten and placing that 1 in the tens column. This builds on the work we have done in additive thinking earlier in the year.

In Reading, students have been working on analysing texts by identifying the author’s purpose and how this influences the language choices an author makes. The use of figurative language such as metaphors and similes enriches the writing and supports the reader to visualise events while the use of factual language adds detail and information to inform the reader.

Students have been developing the skills needed for writing fiction based on actual events. They have conducted research about actual events such as the moon landing and the Indian Ocean Tsunami. They are working on identifying key impacts from the event, developing two characters and describing their involvement and what they saw, heard and felt about the events unfolding around them. This is helping them to personalise and interpret the impact from important historical events and develop character descriptions and settings that are exciting and interesting for their readers.

Space and the Earth’s location in relation to the sun and moon have informed our investigations so far this term. Students have engaged in some hands-on learning while creating models to show the movement of the sun, the moon and the Earth while in orbit

Mrs. Michelle Gorman

Learning Centre Leader

(Heights Campus)