What's happening in our learning spaces? 

,STUDENTS OF THE WEEK

FOUNDATION 

We hope that everyone enjoyed the weekend and had lots of fun at the St Fidelis' Community Day. Weekends are a perfect opportunity to rest up and be ready for another fantastic week of learning in Foundation.

As communicators, during our Resilience Project learning over the last couple of weeks, we looked at the word gratitude and unpacked together the meaning of the word. We were able to share with each other that gratitude means being thankful for what we all have. As a class, we brainstormed the people, places and things we are all grateful and appreciative of. Please come into our learning spaces and see the gratitude chains both Foundation learning spaces have on display.

On Wednesday 8th March and Wednesday 15th March, we had time and opportunity to participate in an AFL Footy Clinic. Josh, who works for the AFL, showed us how to handball and kick a footy correctly. We had lots of fun practising our new skills at Benny Court. 

Wow, what amazing experiences we have participated in this week! On Thursday morning once again, the music was pumping in the Hall. Foundation LW and Foundation AP were led by Sheridan from Footsteps to continue our dancing journey to learn lots of new performance skills. Already, we have learnt some impressive dance moves to the song “Move your Feet” from the Trolls movie and this week we learnt some new groovy moves to the song “Dance Monkey”. As a team we focused on being amazing collaborators and we followed the St Fidelis School Agreed Ways to make sure we listened to the speaker and to move safely so that we all had an enjoyable experience. We are looking forward each week to the next session with Sheridan to see what dance moves we can learn and add to our dance repertoire. 

To finish off our week, we had  time and opportunity to get together with our buddies from Year 6 and also the Year 5 students to celebrate St Patrick’s Day on Friday 17th March. Miss O’Flynn, Miss Sargent and Mr Troy shared their Irish Dancing skills to teach us all a couple of dances. It was so much fun being with our buddies and learning new skills together!

 Please remember to bring back any library bags by Tuesday each week so that we can borrow a new book on Wednesday. 

Have a wonderful week. 

Leanne Wenckowski and Alex Phillips

Foundation Team

YEAR 1/2

It has been a week full of fun and exciting educational experiences in the Year 1/2 cohort!

As researchers we had the opportunity to observe and experiment with a variety of artefacts and read information texts to find out about how technology has changed over time. We made connections to the Melbourne Museum. Mrs Watson even brought in an interesting artefact that was used to play videos (A VCR). Most of us hadn’t seen one of these before! We had lots of wonderings and new discoveries:

• I wonder how old TV’s are? (Alessia)
• Were there apps on the first mobile phones? (Eva M)
• I discovered that a typewriter is a machine that people used to type and print but now we use computers, printers and electricity. (Isabel)
• I learnt that in 1985, when some of our parents were kids, the best video game was Super Mario 10. (Giorgio)
• I discovered that a camcorder records videos and sound and stores it onto a tape. People used camcorders to film weddings, birthdays and their family. Now we use phones. (Ariana)

As writers we have been learning to create short texts that inform an audience about experiences that we have engaged in. We have been using the colourful semantics (Who, When, Where, What Doing, What, What Like) to brainstorm vocabulary before writing. We have learnt about language features such as using past tense verbs, sequencing words and adjectives. 

Miss Karalis was very thankful for the families who celebrated her birthday. She feels extremely welcomed into the learning community! 

Over the last two weeks, we had time and opportunity to engage in Footy Clinics with AFL Victoria. We had lots of fun learning new skills, such as kicking, marking and catching! Thank you Josh for teaching us.  Check out some photos below! 

1/2 Team, 

Alycia Marsico, Vania Sparano and Vicky Karalis 

YEAR 3/4

What a wonderful week of learning in Year 3/4!

We have had a great time starting the Footsteps program. We have enjoyed listening and dancing to a variety of different songs and learning funky dance moves to go with them!

“I think that it was pretty good! Here’s why.. Well I think it was great because I loved the dancing even though I am not a dancer and I loved it. The instructor was very welcoming. It was a great use of time!  Who wouldn't want to do this!! Remember I’m not a dancer. It was easy to follow and fun to do! I hate dancing but now it is my passion!” - Alexander H

“Footsteps was absolutely INCREDIBLE! The instructor was welcoming, the dances are SO much fun and it always gets you up and running. What a great way to spend your energy. Footsteps encourages you to dance and give things a go! On Thursday we did an awesome dance to the song ‘BUSINESS’ . The style was Hip Hop and it was so much fun. My favourite move was the side clap, It was so cool!” - Erica D

“Footsteps was so fun because we did all of these dances. I loved the spin dance. The songs were great and it was great to dance with my friends.” - Gus C

As mathematical thinkers, we have been continuing our learning about the place value system. We have been learning to make and represent numbers using different mathematical materials such as MAB blocks, base 10 blocks, counters and unifix blocks. As curious learners, we have had the opportunity to engage in a range of maths games to help us with our finding out about making and representing values. Thank you Mrs Monaghan for joining us in some of our maths lessons!

As a way of preparing for NAPLAN, the Year 3 students have engaged in practice NAPLAN online. This has supported us in navigating our chromebooks, logging in, typing and using our mouse to answer questions and use the program. During this time, Year 4 Students have been also developing their skills in navigating online texts and responding to comprehension questions on the online news resource, Kids News. Congratulations to the Year 3 Students who completed their NAPLAN last week!

As researchers, we have been inquiring into different picture story books about Country and Place. We have read and listened to ‘Welcome to Country’ by Aunty Joy Murphy and Lisa Kennedy, ‘Finding Our Heart’ by Thomas Mayor and ‘My Country’ by Ezekiel Kwaymullina and Sally Morgan. These are all ways of us finding out about our understanding, ‘Sharing of our stories helps us understand each other’. 

Enjoy your week!

Year 3/4 Teachers

Belinda Panzarino & Bianka Zorzut

YEAR 5/6

It was a short but busy week last week for our Year 5/6 students!

Our Year 5 students began the week completing three of their NAPLAN tests, Language Conventions, Reading and Writing. They will complete their final NAPLAN - Numeracy on Tuesday of this week. We would like to congratulate all students on their perseverance, determination and positivity throughout this NAPLAN period. We wish them the best of luck for their final test!

In Literacy this week, the students focussed on characterisation using the STEAL strategy:

Speech - What is the character saying?

Thoughts - What is the characters inner most thoughts 

Emotions - How does this character feel about people/things/ideas?

Actions - What does this character do?

Looks - What does this character look like?

Students then used this strategy to write a paragraph on a character from a popular book, TV show or movie and then presented it to the class for their peers to guess the character. This was a fantastic exercise in developing characterisation in their writing and a fun and engaging lesson!

In Numeracy, the students have completed our unit on Place Value and we now move on to our new unit of Addition. The students have been engaging in some addition games to begin the unit including “Walk the Plank” and “Strike”.  We will continue to develop our understanding of different strategies we can use to solve addition problems including the jump strategy, chunking and using an algorithm. 

In Religion, this week the students learnt all about the SLA’s patron saint  - Saint Patrick!

Our resident expert, Ms O’Flynn, taught us all about Saint Patrick including his early life, his dedication to faith and his connection to the Irish. The students then created a stained glass window depicting Saint Patrick. 

On Friday, our students played another round of Interschool Sports against Coburg Primary School! We are once again very proud of our Year 5/6 students on the way they engage with students from other schools during our sports competitions and also the sportsmanship they show. Thank you to some of the Year 4 students who came along to play with us on Friday, whilst some of our student leaders went to St Patrick's Cathedral to represent St Fidelis School at Mass. 

Also on Friday, our students along with their Foundation buddies participated in some traditional Irish dancing - also known as a Ceili - to celebrate St Patrick’s day. We had so much fun learning two different dances called the “Walls of Limerick” and the “Heel and Toe”. The students love spending time with their buddies and it is such a joy to see so many smiling faces and laughter when they get together.

We would also like to congratulate and thank the 5/6 students for leading the whole school in the dance “An Dreoilin” taught by Ms O’Flynn. It was so much fun and great to see our students getting into the Irish spirit!

We are looking forward to another great week of learning which kicks off with our excursion on Monday to the city to visit the Immigration Museum!

Have a lovely week!

Olivia Sargent, Graham Troy and Aoife O’Flynn  

5/6 Teachers