What's happening in our learning spaces? 

STUDENTS OF THE WEEK

FOUNDATION 

Last week the school community was filled with so much love and laughter as we celebrated Mother’s Day and invited our wonderful mothers, aunties, grandparents and all of the special people in our lives into our Foundation learning space.  On Friday morning, we held our annual Mother’s Day breakfast which saw just how connected our wonderful school community is. 

After our assembly, we gathered in our spaces to spend some quality time with our family. As self-managers, we took the lead in showing our mothers the learning we have completed in our 56 days at school! We engaged in a writing activity and then played a variety of games to end this experience. 

Throughout the week, the Foundations have been creating a ‘goodie bag’ for their mothers. As writers, we wrote about the things our mothers like and dislike. This was an insightful learning experience as communicators to share the different qualities our mothers have and how we are all different. 

This week, we are tuning in to Family Week by exploring our own families and finding out about each other's families. Also, we will explore friendship through The Resilience Project. We really wish to explore how we can be a friend, what friends do to help and assist others and broaden our friendship circle within the Foundation area. 

As always, please remember to bring back any library bags by Tuesday so that we can borrow a new book on Wednesday.  

Have a wonderful week. 

Leanne Wenckowski and Alex Phillips

Foundation Team

YEAR 1/2

We have had another busy week in 1/2, but this one was quite special as we welcomed our mums and special women into our learning spaces. It was beautiful to share the morning together, and there were many smiling faces as we held our Mother’s Day morning. We enjoyed listening to a story, playing a maths game and creating an acrostic poem.  It was a wonderful morning to share together and see the joy and excitement of everyone. 

As writers, we applied our knowledge of verbs, adjectives, letter sounds, spelling patterns and punctuation when writing cards for Mother’s Day. As thinkers, we selected different adjectives to describe our Mums, such as loving, kind, funny and smart and thanked them for all the wonderful things they do for us. We took time and care as we painted our pots and carefully selected our seeds and potted our plants. We are eager to watch them grow with our mums in six weeks when they should bloom. We made connections to the love and care that the plants require to grow and how our mums have done this for us. 

As learners, we have been building our knowledge of non-fiction texts and their features. We have explored topic-specific vocabulary and begun to create our own non-fiction texts. We have used different ways to organise our ideas, like generating mind maps and brainstorming.

In addition, as readers, we have also been engaging with various non-fiction texts and demonstrating our ability to identify their different features, including factual information, diagrams and subheadings, Finally, as thinkers, we have been using contents pages to efficiently locate desired information and diagrams to understand the text better. 

We hope you all had a wonderful Mother’s Day and enjoyed your precious gifts! We can’t wait for the week ahead as we further engage in information report writing, learn new addition strategies in numeracy and have our Walk Safely to School Morning on Friday. 

1/2 Team, 

Alycia Marsico, Vania Sparano and Vicky Karalis.

YEAR 3/4

As part of our Literacy learning, we have been reading about different people's stories. This has been through the Little People, Big Dreams Biographies. As part of this learning, we have been unpacking what is included in a biography to support us when we start to write our own Biography. Some of the people we have inquired about this week include Pele, Steve Jobs, Dolly Parton, and Elton John. We identified when and where they were born, important parts of their lives, what change they created and their family life.

A big Happy Mother's Day to all the Special Women in our Learning Community, we hope you had a wonderful day with the special people in your family. We had a great time on Friday opening up our learning space and engaging with our mums or special female figures.

Last week was Mental Health Awareness Week, children had the time and opportunity to be researchers when identifying different strategies and techniques we can use to support our own mental health. We had the opportunity to create our own personal stress balls and engage in calming /mindfulness colouring. This is where we were able to reflect on these strategies and how they made us feel. These opportunities were also in connection with our Resilience Project Learning that we engage in weekly. 

As part of our Inquiry, we began to think about Australia’s story. Students were placed in small groups and explored different aspects of Australia, this included Landmarks, Cuisine, Geography, Government, Wildlife, First Nations People, Sports and Recreation and Emblems. Students engaged in documenting their first thinking about these topics, they then had the time and opportunity to find out using fact files and books to add to their first thinking. 

We were then so lucky to end our Friday with the opportunity to engage in an incursion, during this incursion we engaged in listening to an Indigenous person from Didgeridoo Education. He shared with us different artefacts about his culture including a Didgeridoo, sliding didgeridoo, Emu egg, Indigenous flag and different types of Boomerangs. Students had the opportunity to dance and play different instruments during this incursion.

We hope you had a wonderful weekend and Happy Mothers' Day to all of our wonderful mums!

Year 3/4 Teachers

Belinda Panzarino & Bianka Zorzut

YEAR 5/6

It was another eventful week in the SLA for our 5/6 students last week. 

Our students began the week exploring their top character strengths through their engagement in The Resilience Project. Whilst they explored the character strengths they felt they possessed, they also reflected on the strengths they see in one another. This was a wonderful opportunity to hear from their peers and recognise others' perspectives. Each of the students identified the strengths they possess and an area they would like to work on. This connected with our North Melbourne Football Club STEM excursion which was all about powering up our strengths and identifying the traits of a STEM learner. 5/6AO had their excursion on Thursday and loved their experience! All our students expressed their joy and excitement throughout the program and we are grateful to Mr Frazzetto for organising such a fun day out for us all!

In Literacy, the students have been learning about the persuasive devices used in various texts to persuade an audience. Last week the students read the story “This is a Ball” by Beck and Matt Stanton. In this text, the authors try to convince their audience that the images are something completely different! The students were tasked with persuading the authors as to why they were wrong and had to use the persuasive devices they were learning about such as rhetorical questions, evidence and emotive language to create a convincing argument. We have some very persuasive and passionate students at our year level! 

In Numeracy, the students have been continuing to explore subtraction. The students have been using a variety of strategies to solve worded problems and equations involving whole numbers and decimal subtraction. The students have also been using their understanding of the connection between addition and subtraction to balance equations. We will finalise our subtraction unit this week and move into a unit on measurement and graphing!

On Friday we welcomed some of our lovely mums into the SLA to join in on a friendly game of Kahoot! Our students and their mums paired up to compete in a quiz about Mother’s Day. Mr Troy raised the stakes by introducing prizes for not only the top 3 place getters but also for 9th and 28th place! We had so much fun and absolutely loved having our wonderful mums in our classrooms. 

The students began their first week of Interschool Sports this week competing in 3 new sports including, Netball, Soccer and Football. Congratulations to all students on their participation and sportsmanship when competing against St Bernards Primary School last week. We look forward to another week of competition on Friday against Newlands Primary School. 

Have a wonderful week, 

5/6 Team,

Olivia Sargent, Graham Troy and Aoife O’Flynn.