News from JLC

On Thursday the 25th November, the Prep and JLC classes had their first excursion for two long years due to Covid. The children were extremely excited in the lead up to the day and their excitement the morning of the excursion was palpable!  There was much animated conversation, laughter, singing and even prayers for no rain on the bus to the aquarium and we were fortunate that the rain held off until we were safely back on the bus. 

The children thoroughly enjoyed seeing the penguins and watching them be fed, as well as catching a glimpse of the cute fluffy bottom of a baby penguin as it was being kept warm and protected by its mother. 

Other aquarium highlights included the sharks, seahorses and sea dragons, a humongous crocodile and a sleeping shark! 

Upon their return to school, students had some play outside followed by an art collage activity where they created their own underwater haven for a variety of sea creatures. Miss Wills is still cleaning up the sand in the Art Room, which was used to create the bottom of many aquariums. 

Following a delicious afternoon tea, some more art and then dinner, students changed into their pyjamas and snuggled down into their sleeping bags to watch the movie Finding Dory. 

A great day was had by all and special thanks to Mrs Maher for her organisation of the day, Talia and Mrs Thomson for helping out with the food and Ms Durrant for helping supervise.

JLC students have been learning about fractions in Maths. Two of the major points for learning, were that fractions are made up of equal parts and that when writing a fraction the numerator is on top and the denominator is on the bottom. 

We talked about how the numerator represents part or a piece of an object or number and the denominator represents the entire amount of pieces in the object or number. Students engaged in some folding and labelling activities where they had to carefully fold pieces of paper to represent halves, quarters and eighths. For those students who wanted more of a challenge they folded to sixteenths, thirty-seconds and sixty-fourths! There was also the additional challenge of how to fold a rectangle into equal thirds. 

Following on from and making use of their folding and labelling of fraction skills, students were tasked with creating a fraction animal. Students had the opportunity to work independently or in pairs and there was some great teamwork being demonstrated, as well as some highly creative fraction creatures.

During class sport the students in JLC have been learning how to play Tee-Ball.  Tee-Ball is a team sport that is very similar to the game of baseball and is a game that is used to introduce young children to the game through its simplified rules. As well as this, it is also used as a way of helping children to develop hand/eye coordination and ball skills.

The object of the game is for one team to defeat another by scoring more runs. They do this by attempting to score as many runs as they can during their innings and attempting to prevent their opposition's scoring runs whilst fielding. Over the last few weeks we have seen excellent development in the student’s batting and fielding skills.

We have also seen great sportsmanship and team spirit among the students.  We are determined at St Bridget’s to be well prepared and experts in the game for when we participate in Inter School sports in the near future.

Kind regards

Signora Gina Michieli and Miss Carly Wills

JLC Classroom Teachers