What's Happening at OLA

Pre-Kindy

The start to the term has been busy and smooth. With Mother’s Day around the corner, the children are cleverly creating beautiful master pieces for their own special mummy…sshhhh! We are learning about our families this term and the children’s work reflects this, through activities such as; bathing baby dolls, washing doll’s clothes, pegging them on the line and ironing them! We are learning new songs like, Skid-A-Marink and Suzy Had a Baby, and we are discussing what we do with our family. This term, one focus will also be on learning our surname!

We have a shop in our dramatic play area this term. There will be lots of learning in Mathematics, for example; counting money, sharing, and turn taking. So far, the shopping trolleys have proved very popular! The new measuring tape was also a hit! Some children were keen to use the toy tape measure and measure how tall their friends were. They even measured Mrs Petkovic!  I think we may well do some more measuring this week too!

May God bless you all.

Mrs Petkovic

Kindy

During the last week of Term 1, the Kindy children took part in a special incursion conducted by Nature Play Solutions. Becky, the Loose Parts presenter, brought her big truck full of ‘junk’ and loose parts. Loose parts are the opposite of toys. Toys are designed with specific purposes; loose parts are not. Some of the items included steering wheels, ropes, computer keyboards, tyres, blankets, legless chairs, walking sticks, pool noodles, springs, buntings, tripods, boogie boards, the list goes on!

As the Kindy children picked up these items, their imaginations ran wild. We had children setting up for a big party, creating traps to catch dragons, making waterslides and surfing, having garage sales and so much more. It was incredible to watch all the children so engaged in this open-ended play and it was interesting to listen to all the conservations that were taking place.

The Kindy children had such a fun time during this incursion and couldn’t stop talking about it after. It was the best way to end the term!

Mrs Fruvall and Mrs Taylor

Year 1

This week we have been sharing stories about our awesome mums as we lead up to Mothers' Day. We have enjoyed reading the story, Super Mum, and making our own connections to our ‘super mums’. We have painted and decorated pictures of our mums, we have written a description about our mums and we have even made a little treat for them. We have been learning about adjectives and we have brainstormed adjectives to describe our mums.

This term, we have been learning about skip counting. We have used beaded number lines to skip count in tens, ordered number cards to skip count in fives and twos, learnt songs about skip counting and played lots of Maths games.

Miss Saraceni and Mrs Ravi

Year 3

Our current Art focus has been on Australian Landscapes, more specifically, Uluru. The children viewed several pieces of artwork created by Danny Eastwood, who is well known for his Aboriginal artwork, using lines, dots and pictures.  The children were asked to recreate Danny Eastwood's Uluru painting, using the mediums of oil pastels and paint. Below is a selection of what some of our clever Year 3s created. 

Mrs Calleja, Mrs Pilatti and Mrs Tollis

Year 5

Year 5s have had a wonderful start to Term 2. At the moment we are working hard and preparing for NAPLAN next week.

In writing, we have been focusing on persuasive texts and making sure we include all of the correct structures. We have been learning about rhetorical questions and emotive language.  It is the only time we are allowed to be bossy with our writing and not think about other people's thoughts or opinions.  We have  even been allowed to use 'fake' facts, so that has been a lot of fun.  We have been  self editing our work  to make improvements. We hope you enjoy reading some of our writing samples below.

In Maths, we are continuing to develop our knowledge of times tables. Times tables is something that we all agree is essential and that we need to be able recite automatically. It helps us in so many other areas of Maths.   So, every day, we spend time practising our tables and we are all showing constant improvement. 

Life in Year 5 is pretty amazing and we look forward to the rest of our learning journey this term.

Ms Knight and Mr McIntyre