Dear Parents / Caregivers

This week we are all excited to be getting dressed up as book characters as a culminating activity for Book Week. Parade starts at 9am, please come along. 

As part of our learning this week, students have drafted and written their own story with a simple narrative structure. We have also continued to develop our oral retelling of a story, including main events and in sequential order. 

We continue to focus on decoding, blending and segmenting words for reading and spelling. So far we have introduced the following phonograms: “a-z and oi, dge, oo, sh, ir, oy, ai, ng, or, ee, ph, er, wh, ed, th, ow, ur, ch, ay”. The phonograms are introduced to the students to help them develop the skills needed for reading. 

In Maths we are continuing to learn about positional language and programming by incorporating our technology unit with the use of OzoBots. 

Next week we are looking forward to the Father’s Day Liturgy and Colour Run Obstacle Course. Keep an eye out for more details.

Have a wonderful week. 

Kind Regards

Miss Andrieka Knight

Firstly, a HUGE congratulations to the students who have returned their Sight Words book this week. We have never had so many students organised for homework. Thank you!!! You will notice a yellow reminder note attached to your child’s bag if we haven’t seen their sight word book by Thursday of each week.

We have enjoyed some outdoor learning recently. As you know we are learning about water in Science. Today we built water cycle models in the sand pit. Each group made their own town with a river running to a central dam, providing each town with water. We built a hills, trees and clouds and named each part of the water cycle. This was a great chance to not only develop our Science knowledge and vocabulary, but also skills for working productively in a team. It provided us with lots of opportunities to learn ways to respectfully communicate our ideas with peers.

We took advantage of having our soft toys at school by enjoying a Teddy Bears picnic on Thursday at second break. It was wonderful to see the students socialising with each other and enjoying the company of their teddies. Our Media stories are coming along well but they are time consuming so we will need our soft toys again next week please.

Thank you!

Fuzzles were a winner in Year 1 this week!  We used our story graph to write a sizzling start, middle and ending to a story about fuzzles.  We incorporated tricky words and practised our doubling rules. Ask the students to tell you how Zack and Floss can help you with your spelling!  Next week we'll be learning how to make adjectives (describe nouns) and adverbs (describe verbs) by adding the suffix “y” (happy, dirty) and “ly” (quickly, lazily).

In Maths we consolidated our knowledge of place value by partitioning numbers, regrouping tens and ones, and solving simple addition and subtraction stories.  We demonstrated our knowledge by choosing three 2 digit numbers. In a book, we demonstrated that we can write our numbers in digits and in words, we can draw a picture of our numbers, we can sequence our numbers from smallest to largest, and we can plot our numbers on a number line.  Next week we will be exploring growth patterns and how we can use these to form algorithms.

In Science we made food chains to model the changes of our objects during our experiments.  For example, our corn kernels were small and hard, we applied heat, they became popcorn which was white and fluffy, they cannot be changed back to their original state.  Our icy pole was cold and hard, we applied heat and it melted, it was sticky and runny, it can be changed back to its original state by placing it in the freezer.

This week we say goodbye and goodluck to Genevieve Shelton.  We wish her and her family the best of luck for their next adventure in Brisbane.  We have a special surprise planned for her on Thursday.

The weeks are definitely flying by this term. We have been busy at work constructing information reports as a practice for a more formal writing assessment. The students were given the choice of an animal, person, place and object. Once completed they will be provided feedback to ensure they get the best outcome in their next writing assessment at the end of the term. In our Media lessons we have been practicing creating iMovies on a book that they would love others to read. The book trailers have come a long way and the students are learning the skills to make some professional trailers that will hopefully hook readers in. Our Math lessons have been a focus now on place value with sorting numbers from smallest to largest, expanded notation, number line placement and rounding. There has been some healthy competition in our place value card game this past week with Max taking out the top spot on Wednesday with the most highest numbers created. Religion lessons are still about exploring superheroes of the bible with the students looking at Gideon and Samson. Who would have thought that glorious long hair could give you superpowers… Samson did. The students have learnt the hidden meaning behind these bible stories and are bringing the heroes to life using creative pop up art elements in their superhero book. The students have investigated shadows and how they work in conjunction with the sun and how they change during the daylight hours. We will be looking at how the Earth orbits the sun and the spinning motion of the Moon as well. Solar eclipses will be explored as well as lunar eclipse. Aboriginal astronomy will be another area we will explore as well which will link perfectly with our History unit this term. I want to thank all of the parents for all the effort you went to ensuring your children we organised for school photos and book week dress up. The events at school take time and effort from you as well as ourselves and we do appreciate all you do in ensuring your child’s schooling experience is as enjoyable as it can be. This past fortnight’s attendance has 17 of our students attending school 100% of the time. Great effort everyone considering some of the illnesses that are going around at the moment. 

Our attendance this fortnight is that 15 students are attending 100% of the time. It is an improvement from last week and not unsurprising with the sickness virus going around. Please let myself and the office know of any absences if they arise.

We have started looking at the exploration of the First Fleet in our history and writing lessons. The students have been learning about the conditions in England that led to the 8 month sea journey. We have been imagining the hardships faced by children in this era and the decisions they had to make to survive. We discussed a list of the food the convicts and free people had to eat for long journey and come up with some interesting menus:

• Breakfast: Beef and cheese, hard tack or oatmeal
• Lunch: dried peas, vinegar, beef with vinegar and ships biscuit
• Dinner: salted pork and beef, beef with oatmeal and dried peas, whatever scraps left for the convicts

I think we can all thank the lucky stars we were born in a different time!

We have continued on from looking at measurement in maths to looking at shapes. We have been developing definitions for shapes by looking at their properties like sides, angles and vertices (see below). We also know that shapes can be combined together to make new shapes. We can do this by using our imagination, drawing pictures or using games like the one below.

We have been practising our phonograms every morning . each day we focus on a different phonogram and when we find words with the phonogram in our books, we record it.

Year 5 have continued analysing the structure of poetry and will present an anthology of poems at the end of the unit.  They have looked at similes, metaphors and imagery.

In Maths we have been working with angles which produced an interesting discussion on reflex angles and revolutions.  The students also continue to improve their times tables knowledge by completing a challenge at the beginning of each lesson.

Visual Arts lessons have produced images of lightning and bushfires using paint and coloured pastels on a black background.  Examples of bushfires are below.

Students are continuing to develop their resilience by discussing and formulating rules and strategies that allow games of handball at lunchtime to continue without disagreements.  An ongoing process that is developing great social skills and maturity.

This week the big excitement throughout the school has been Book Week. Many new books have been purchased at the book fair, and students are enjoying reading at school and at home. Between now and the end of the term, all students will be completing their reading benchmark tests so we will have a good picture of how much they have improved in their reading and comprehension. 

In Religion this term we have been learning about the ways that the Church continues the work of Jesus in the world of today. This has included learning about the biblical foundations of charity and social justice, and some of the organisations that do these important works. We have also talked about the way the Church ministers to all people through the sacraments and in schools, hospitals and other institutions, and we have visited St Joseph’s Church to discuss how the church building and its furnishings are used to support people in responding to God. 

Many of the students are becoming quite adept at using Auslan, the Australian sign language of the deaf community. In the past two weeks we have learnt many new words for foods and talking about the weather. Some of us are also quite adept at counting, but we are not yet at the point of being able to do our maths in silence!

The students have begun several assessment tasks which will be completed over the next couple of weeks. Most of the work on these will be done in class time, but all students would benefit from spending some extra time working on their tasks at home as well. Reading every day and using maths strategies in everyday life are also great things to do and always helpful. 

Thanks to all the parents who have replied with their intentions about our year six camp. The kit list and official consent forms are being prepared and should be sent home very soon.