PLC News

Professional Learning Community Foundation  (Preps)

Wow! This year is really flying… we can’t believe we have reached our very last term of Prep. 

We’ve had a wonderful start to the term in the Prep classrooms starting with some presentations in GRIL. We started with students bringing in something that moves, as pictured. It was great having the students share information about their item and then getting to answer questions from their peers. 

In Literacy, we have been focusing on our new topic which is Under the Sea animals. Students have been reading a range of fiction and non-fiction texts about different sea creatures and we have started our Writers’ Festival description focusing on different animals. Our writing is already starting to look spectacular and we can’t wait to share the final piece in Week 4 at our Writers’ Festival. 

In Numeracy, we have been counting down the days until school finishes, practising counting forwards and backwards from different numbers and we’ve been looking at ordinal numbers eg. 1st, 2nd 3rd. 

A few things to remember for this term:

• As we are now in Term 4 it is a requirement that students wear hats outside, if you are wishing to purchase a new hat this can be done from our school office.
• Water bottles, we do ask students bring a water bottle to school each day with their name on it to avoid any confusion. 
• Toys, students are being asked to leave toys at home to avoid them becoming lost or damaged.
• Please make sure students are at school by 8:50am so we can start our learning at 9am. 

We hope you have a great week!

Professional Learning Community 1  (Grade 1 )

I hope that everyone enjoyed the 2 weeks break and spent some cherished time with their families. 

We are off to a great start to the term here in Grade 1. We have been busy getting back into routine and students are happy to be back with their friends. Everyone is getting right into Delacombe Primary School’s Writing Festival by turning the whole school into an underwater oasis and by creating our magnificent writing pieces. We cannot wait to show you all our published pieces very soon. 

Our Project Based Learning (PBL) subject is very exciting this term as every Grade 1 class have a little classroom pet, TADPOLES!!! The kids have been enthusiastically watching them turn slowly from a tadpole into frogs. It’s been really lovely watching the kids take responsibility of their class pets by feeding, changing their water each day and cleaning the tanks.

Professional Learning Community 2 (Grade 2 ) 

Well done to our wonderful PLC2 on settling back into our school routines and expectations so well. We have been impressed with the way so many students have shown persistence and resilience upon their return to Term 4. We continue to remind students to think of kind ways to express their opinions to other students and to practise problem-solving, where possible, before involving a teacher. We are so proud of the consideration, respect and support many of our Grade 2 students already show to their peers. 

Don't forget - Term 4 is a hat term. Students need a named hat at school. Some hats are becoming a little small for students' heads. Please check-in with your child about their hat, to ensure they have a named hat that fits and will enable them to play outside without needing to be under-cover. 

In Reading, students have got straight back into their learning with a focus on analysing. We have been looking at the genre of a text, the author's purpose, the text features and the meaning of the text. This is a great skill to practise when we read at home. 

In Writing, we have begun working on our Writer's Festival piece. Our theme is 'Antarctic Antics' and we will be describing what we see under the majestic seas of Antarctica. Our students have loved discussing the many animals and plants we can see under the ocean, as well as the wild temperatures they might face. We look forward to sharing our beautiful writing with you all in Week 4. Please remember to keep sending in milk bottles for us to use as decorations. 

In Numeracy, we have been learning to transform shapes - including flip, slide and rotate. Students can demonstrate these moves to their adults at home. 

In PBL, we are studying Biological Science with a focus on lifecycles. The Grade 2 classes all have tadpoles swimming around in the classroom, which we are excited to watch grow into frogs one day soon. 

We are looking forward to another great term in PLC2! 

Professional Learning Community 3 (Grade 3)

PLC 3 had a wonderful trip out to Earth Ed last week. We spent the day as palaeontologists discovering bones, using our prior knowledge and then inferring what we thought we had found. Speaking of inferring, we are doing more of it this week in our reading lessons- taking the clues from the text, combining it with our prior knowledge, to read between the lines. We’re doing this to help with our predictions and to better understand the settings and characters. 

Writers’ Festival preparation has begun and we have started our ocean odyssey down into the deep, dark, abyss- keep an eye out for further Writers’ Fest details as you won’t want to miss it! In Numeracy we have begun looking at input, functions and output by playing games with function machines.

Can you work out what the function would be for the examples below?

Question a)

Question b)

And finally in Science our thumbs have turned green as we have started researching and observing the germination process of plants. Don’t mind us if you see us with our heads in the garden trying to identify all the different parts of a flower. We are also growing some beans so that we can see up close the process which occurs from seed to plant. 

(The function for question a was doubling or x2, and the function for question b  was +5)

Professional Learning Community 4 (Grade 4)

We hope you all had a relaxing holiday and ready for an exciting, fun-filled, busy Term 4! We began last week with our annual swimming program at Shayne Reece. Students had a wow of a time shooting through the water like a torpedo and kicking their feet like AFL footballers. 

In our Reading, students are analysing non-fiction texts by identifying how the author engages the reader by including descriptive language and providing many features to add interest such as labelled diagrams, maps and close-ups. We are also discussing if the author has the correct credentials or qualifications to write the text. As the Writer’s Festival is in a few weeks, students are using all of their brilliant ideas, figurative language and sentence starters to write an amazing piece. Each day students write a paragraph which culminates in a description, ready for publishing. Students are feeling over the moon as they can’t wait for parents to see their finished piece.

In Numeracy, students will be learning all about Numero again. Last year each student strived to win against their peers in their class. These winners then tried to win and be the PLC champion! The aim of the game is to make the most points. Who will be our PLC4 champion for 2022? 

Enjoy the rest of Week 2,

PLC4 Teachers

Professional Learning Community 5 (Grade 5)

Welcome back to Term 4, I hope everyone has had a chance to rejuvenate and is ready for another busy term. So far this term students have been learning about how to conduct an effective book club beginning with picture storybooks and moving into looking at novels. This week students have been working on the skills of predicting and inferring.

 In Writing, students have been working on their Writer’s Festival piece – a topic that encompasses the legend that is Atlantis! Already I have been blown away by students‘ incredible use of vocabulary and imagery. I can’t wait to read the finished products and I hope that you can all join us to celebrate the effort and hard work at our Writer’s Festival Assembly in Week 4. 

In Numeracy, students have been exploring the concepts of volume, capacity, mass and length through a range of open-ended tasks. We have also worked on building students’ understanding of appropriate units of measurements and how units can be converted. 

We can’t wait to share many more adventures in our next instalment! That’s all from PLC 5. 

Professional Learning Community 6 (Grade 6)

Can you believe that we are in the last term of the year – how time flys when you are having fun. We in PLC 6 have settled back into the term like ducks to water. We are ready and excited about completing this last part of the term off at Delacombe Primary School. Over the next six weeks we will be learning about the next steps for our learning journey as we prepare for High School. We have been lucky to have weekly visits from the Smith Family to help prepare us for this monumental milestone.

In Writing, we have been learning about the impact of the environmental challenges that severely impact our oceans. These readings and investigations help us to be able to identify credible and reliable sources. Through these skills we have been fine tuning our ability to search, locate and summarise important information that relates to our classes topics. These readings are setting the foundation of our knowledge, knowledge which we are applying in our writing – new words, developing understanding, all of which are adding great depth to our narrative writing piece. Our theme this year for the Writers' Festival is SAVE OUR SEAS…we are super excited about creating depth to our writing pieces, and cannot wait to showcase these skills at our writers’ festival in Week 4.

Numeracy this week sees us challenging our minds with collecting, organising and displaying data. We have been having lots of fun with collecting and analysing this data in different ways – in particular we have been collecting data to see if we can identify numbers that reoccur and use this information to influence success in games we are playing!

SNEAK PEAK – in the classrooms we are busy creating displays for the writers festival displays!!

Have a great week and keep smiling!

PS – Rex was super excited to be a feature of this newsletter!