3/4 News

It is pleasing to see some of our friends returning from their absences due to illness. Thank you to the parents who have kept children home when unwell, even if only the sniffles, as this helps to keep infections down. We are continuing our health routines of sanitising our hands etc especially during the colder months and the flu season.

LITERACY

On Tuesday we did our ‘Big Write” about Grandparents, it was wonderful to see the students so engaged with their writing. All we could hear was the tapping and scratching of pencils on paper. You could see the concentration on their faces as they recorded their thoughts. Thanks to the parents that took the opportunity to discuss the prompt with their children over the weekend as we requested. When we do these “Big Write” sessions it is good for the children to develop ideas and their vocabulary for the writing before we do the task; that is why we sent the prompt out on SeeSaw.

Keeping with the theme of Grandparents….We also had a lovely morning on Wednesday doing the National Simultaneous Story Time with the book, “Family Tree”. After listening to and exploring the book we created our own trees and recorded our reflections about people, place, events and culture that have shaped us and made us who we are. We finished the task by writing some prayers for our families and for the world using the Haiku poetry format.

Our poetry unit is continuing for one more week and we have loved exploring this creative form of writing and developing our expressive writing.

MATHEMATICS

We have had a wonderful time exploring our concept of money, this has also honed our addition and subtraction skills through creating shopping lists, calculating change, and working out if something is a bargain if we see 10% or 25% off the price. Each group has worked at their own level expanding their knowledge and working with manipulatives or doing complex calculations or anywhere in between. It has been fun ‘spending’ money and buying things within a budget too.

We will now move back to Multiplication and Division. We did a bit of it earlier in the year and we now go back and develop knowledge further. The four processes are skills we develop over time and we generally touch on them several times a year, refreshing, renewing and then growing the understanding of how numbers work. Please remember to continually discuss how they are going with their timestables for homework and to provide opportunities to practice e.g. when shopping, working out how many things we may need for jobs etc.

INQUIRY

We have collected all our information about our biomes and are putting together our posters. We now begin phase two of the unit…our animals. Each child from their group will pick a different animal from their biome and investigate it. In class we will investigate classification, life cycle, diet, habitat and different adaptations to survive in their habitats. This information will be part of their presentation at the Expo on Tuesday 21st of June.

For their homework for the next fortnight, we ask that each child create a model or art piece showing their animal. All the details will be on Monday’s Homework sheet. They can be as creative as they want and we encourage them to put in some time and effort as it is the main focus for that fortnight's homework.

RELIGION

Our focus for Religion is God’s beautiful world and how we can look after it. The children have been incorporating this into our literacy time creating poems and art pieces. It was lovely to see their understanding of the Genesis Creation story too.

Respectful Relationships Program

Our new focus is Positive Coping, we have played games where we discovered how we are different but how we are also similar. We discussed how we have to accept others as we are not so different after all. Being inclusive makes for better friendships, happier classrooms and friendlier playgrounds at school.

Buddies

We have been having so much fun in Buddy time lately and you can see the results of our lessons decorating the corridor.

We did an activity all about BEE-ing the kindest we can be. We made cute little bumble bees and then wrote inside the words that we want to be… kind, friendly, patient, etc now they are buzzing around the corridor encouraging others.

Last week we shared a book called “Who you are meant to be” by Joanna Gaines and learnt about being unique. We then created hot air balloons, all with their own unique designs and they are also decorating our corridors.

https://youtu.be/umnk_Tv_5Qk

Kinder Visits

After a few disappointments we finally got to visit our friends at Nagle Kinder again. Will, Vincent, Tilly, Edie and Isla had a lovely time talking and playing and creating with Red Group. I don't know who is sadder when the time comes to leave; their children or ours??? As you can see from the photos this fabulous experience has many benefits for all.