Class Happenings
Wow, what a busy term. We were involved with many aspects of the Henry Lawson Festival and many students from our class had starring roles in our school play.
In Religious Education, we have explored the Three Worlds of the Text as a framework for understanding Bible stories. We looked at The Good Samaritan as a whole class study and now the students are working on their chosen texts. With choice available for presentation, we are seeing some students choosing Google Slides and others have chosen to create a story map.
In English, we have been working on creating information texts. We have revised our work on the differences between facts and opinions. We have also been working on developing our paragraph writing structures. Many of the students have enjoyed reading the information text collection from the Literary Resource Room. Each student is now publishing an information text that includes a table of contents, subheadings, paragraphs and a glossary.
In Mathematics, we have been revising our understanding of using place value to read and order large numbers. We are also revising number facts to 20 using efficient strategies. All students were given multiplication tables to learn for homework, hopefully this is going well.
In Science and Technology, we are continuing our unit on Living Things. We have studied plants, fruit and vegetables and will begin to investigate animals in the remaining weeks of the term. I have asked children to bring in samples of animal homes, so far we have some amazing photographs of a bird nest (thanks Mel) and some leaves that an insect has chosen to use as a home and some seashells.
Our History unit has investigated Aboriginal local heritage and their connection to place. We were lucky to have Terry Carroll visit us and share his knowledge. The students read some stories and Terry left us with a comprehensive list of Aboriginal language. Thanks Terry.
In PDHPE, we have continued to inquire about healthy living. As the school grounds were a bit wet last week we did some dance in the classroom. We learned to move to the Peppermint Twist, The Mexican Hat Dance and the Hokey Pokey. Peppermint twist was the overwhelming favourite.
In Creative Arts, the students have been investigating the ancient form of Indonesian Shadow Puppetry called Wayang Kulit. Small groups of students are now working on developing a story for their own shadow puppets based on an Aboriginal Dreamtime Story.
NUMERACY
Year 5/6 students have continued their investigation of volume and capacity. Students were challenged to discover how many centicubes it would take to fill a 1 meter cube. Students were able to work this out by discovering how many centicubes it takes for the length, then they were able to apply their knowledge of the row – column – repeated layer structure of volume to discover the answer.
The next challenge was to discover how many geoshape cubes needed to fill the cube. This was challenging as the cubes measured 7x7x7.
Students using a storyboard to complete a number of activities with the data gathered from the grid box volume investigation. This provided opportunities to create a table, a graph, draw the boxes, record the formula and write about the investigation using mathematical language.
Year 2/3/4 are developing efficient strategies for working with numbers. Our warm up this week was to look at a collection of dice and discover the total number of dots showing on top. We discussed the strategies that were used. We used grouping and friends of ten, counting on
Grouping the number of dots
Making friends of ten. The next challenge was to add the total number of dots under the dice to find the hidden total using knowledge of dice opposite face totals.
Kindergarten and year 1 have continued to develop understanding of length. Kindergarten used a strip of ribbon measuring 30 cm. They discovered items that were the same as, longer than and shorter than 30cm. Year 1 students used ribbon 1 metre long to do the same.
We also made some gingerbread dolls to join together and make longest and shortest.
