From the Classroom

Foundation

The Foundation children have been learning about Time with a strong focus on the features of an analogue clock. The features we focussed on were hands and face. Much discussion was generated upon the whereabouts of analogue clocks in their house.  They were also introduced to the name of “digital clock” as well. The children were most impressed with making this clock and loved the gold paper to make the hands. 

We have been involved in Alphabet Revision this week.  We have practiced saying the name, sound and listing of objects that begin with that sound. We begin our lessons with the anchor chart that explicitly tells the children what we are learning and how do we know, how we are going with this, (Learning Intention and Success Criteria.) It is important that your child is familiar with the name and sound of the  following; Ss, Tt, Ww,  Ff,  Mm, Aa,  Ii,  Pp. These letters have had primary focus this term.  Always encourage the writing of them at home and it is a wonderful idea to have a small whiteboard to practice on at home.  (They are four/five dollars at Kmart)  Whiteboards allow the children to take stronger risks as they can quickly rub mistakes out, and try again.

Tomorrow is our Sports Day! Please remember that we ask the children to wear a coloured t-shirt of their house team and a water bottle is a must.  It is a very active day so an early to bed will be important tonight. There will be lots of breaks for the Foundation children and they may not participate in all the events. We are fortunate with the weather being only forecast to be around 21 degrees. Hope you have the opportunity to observe, even if it is a short time. 

Grade 3 

The children have been working on the following in each learning area.

Reading: We have continued another week of practising our decoding skills to check the beginning and end of a tricky word. Think about what word makes sense here in the text. 

Writing: We have focussed on the show don’t tell approach with our Narrative writing piece. Good writers show us how the character is feeling and this creates an image in the readers mind. 

Punctuation: The children have been working on contractions. In pairs they have worked together to build words and have been learning how to shorten these words into contractions. Also aiming to get the apostrophe in the correct position. 

Maths:  The focus has been able to tell the digital and analogue time with quarter past and to times, as well as, time to the minute. Also work on time conversions of seconds, minutes, hours days, weeks, months and years.  

Chemical Science: The children have been learning about the power of heat and melting different coloured crayons and recording their times in minutes in seconds.