Spotlight on Learning

Stage 1

It has been so wonderful to see the students in KW become a part of the Roselea community and come into their own in such a short time. The past few weeks have been filled with making friends, fun learning and taking part in special school events. 

The budding mathematicians in KW have been learning about different ways to represent numbers, practising their numeral formation and developing their subitising skills. Students have loved using the linking blocks to show different ways a number can be represented. They have shown great recognition of how we can see numbers everywhere in different forms and shown great communication and problem-solving skills in their representations with the linking blocks. It has been inspiring to see all our students aim so high in how creative and original they can be when tackling open-ended tasks like these. 

Students have loved using their whiteboards to practice their numeral formation alongside developing their subitising skills. We have been aiming to develop number sense in students by practising our numeral formation alongside drawing corresponding dot arrays for students to visualise what each number can represent. They have also loved playing different maths games around number sense and substituting. 

For literacy, KW continue to develop in their phonics and letter-sound knowledge through our InitiaLit Program. We have already learned about the letters/sounds, 'm, s, t, a’, and students have just begun to use phonics knowledge and skills to decode and construct words with these letters. It has been so exciting to watch our students use their newfound understanding of letter-sounds to begin their reading and writing journey. 

It's hard to believe we are getting close to the end of the term and it has been a pleasure to see our kindergarten students grow and develop in their learning. We are all looking forward to the new and exciting things the rest of the term and school year brings for KW!

Mr Widjaja – KW Classroom Teacher

Stage 2

Welcome to a Snapshot of 4F. We have been very busy doing lots of narrative writing in the past weeks and have just started learning the techniques of how to write a strong persuasive text. So, families be prepared, your child may start to persuade you about buying that new toy or puppy! 

Last week, we visited KW and KR to show some of the homework posters we made, “Welcome to Roselea’. The students’ posters included lots of positive language, colourful school logos, and thoughtful ideas, and helped the Kindy students to feel very welcome. While we were in KW we talked to the students and helped them with their cutting and gluing. Now, when we see each other we say ‘hello’ to them in the playground. 

Once a fortnight, Mr Wright works with 4F. He is a computer expert and helps us to improve our laptop skills in a very interesting way. Mr Wright poses a problem, and the students need to find solutions. One example included a program where students were the characters in a virtual playground and had to find any issues, such as a broken fence or uneven ground. Students then had to find cost-effective solutions to these problems, adding a table to their document to write in the costs of fixing the playground problems. 

In mathematics, we have been looking at area, perimeter, and length. We have looked at ways to measure areas of regular and irregular shapes and learnt how our multiplication tables can help us to work out the area quickly. To measure larger areas, we used trundle wheels and the term ‘metre squared’. We measured a square metre using masking tape so we could actually see how big it is. At the end of this lesson, we predicted how many 4F students would fit into the square metre.  

Any guesses? Some of our predictions were 3, 4, 10.   

The answer was 16 students (4 rows of 4) in one square metre!  

Miss Fairgrieve - 4F Classroom Teacher

Stage 3

In mathematics 6L has recently focussed on comparing, ordering, adding and subtracting decimals. Fitting nicely into this was Pi Day which mathematicians celebrate on March 14 (3/14). The class experimented with dividing the circumferences of various circular objects by their diameter, finding the answer always being fairly close to 3.14. Once the class had experimented with using Pi on their calculators to find the area of circles, the challenge became to remember it to as many digits as possible. Several students made it beyond 50, but the Pi Memorisation Challenge culminated in Makayla reciting Pi to 135 digits in front of the 3-6 assembly.

During Week 8 6L’s writing focus was beginning narratives with a ‘sensational start’ to ‘hook’ the reader. We looked at examples from famous authors and studied the techniques that could be used to engage the reader immediately in the story. Below, Chloe has used dialogue to begin her story then written a paragraph allowing the reader to visualise the setting and get to understand the two main characters.

Mr Love - 6L Classroom Teacher