PLT Spotlight

Year 2

The Year 2 cohort have been very busy learning lots in maths this term. Throughout the

 first half of term 1 we have been learning about skip counting which saw us play lots of counting games and hands on activities where our students could practice the skill of identifying patterns.  We are currently learning about place value in a number with an emphasis on 3 digit numbers.  Students have been engaged in lessons where they are practising the skill of matching a 3 digit number to its written form and its visual representation, we have loved using concrete blocks also to represent hundreds, tens and ones. 

By far our year 2 favourite maths lesson thus far was our Jelly Bean Graphing activity.  For the last few weeks we have been working on representing data using tally marks, creating pictogram graphs and answering questions about the data we collect. 

Year 5

Whilst Reading, we have been very busy strengthening and growing our inferencing proficiencies.  We have used our comprehension strategies to analyse information by integrating and linking ideas from a variety of print and digital sources.  We completed our own “book tasting” event and have been inspired by a range of authors and different texts such as Paul Jennings and his short stories from his book, Uncanny. 

Currently we are broadening our Main Idea skills by using our research abilities including, identifying research purpose, locating texts, gathering and organising information, evaluating its relative value and summarising information from several sources.  We completed an online escape room where we used our comprehension strategies to solve 5 different Main Idea focused tasks using Webscape.  We can’t wait to see where our reading skills will take us next! 

In Writing, our Year 5 students have been focusing on writing narrative and persuasive texts to prepare for NAPLAN which is in a few short weeks.  Students have already created well-structured narratives, including the use of onomatopoeia to quickly capture the attention of their audience.  They have also revisited the use of punctation and higher tiered vocabulary to improve their writing over the first few weeks of this term.  Students are now beginning to work on arguing their opinion on a range of different persuasive topics that they feel strongly about. 

In Math, we have been further developing our multiplication skills by trialling a range of ways to solve multiplication problems using number sentences, vertical multiplication, the lattice method and the area model.  Students have identified which strategies work best for them and have applied these methods to solve a range of challenging problems.  We have also been having fun manipulating shapes through rotation, translation, reflection, and symmetry.  Students had a fantastic time creating their own symmetry art.  Soon we are heading into our unit on division, we will learn to connect our multiplication skills to division problems and solve a range of open-ended problems.