KINDER

Our new Religion unit is “The Church as the Family of God”. We learn that the Church is not just a building but is made up of all the people who belong to God’s family. We discussed the questions, “What is a family?” and “Why is belonging to a family important?” We identified some important things about being part of a family such as feeling accepted, feeling loved and feeling safe. We viewed the video, “Love is a Family” by Roma Downey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXhYNlEeWq0 

In English we should have learnt to read and spell words that belong to the ‘at’, ‘am’, ‘ap’ and ‘an’ families eg. map, man. Consolidating these skills is part of the homework that has been sent home. Please continue to check these words and send the booklet back on Friday.

Our Literature unit is “Going on a Bear Hunt”. You can view the author, Michael Rosen, acting out the story on You tube. We are having fun acting along with him and are developing our Drama skills as well.

In Maths we have covered Measuring Length and 2D space. For Home Learning, the class made cardboard critters and ordered them from longest to shortest. Van did an excellent job, check out his photo.

Our History unit is “Families, Food, Festivities”. The KEY INQUIRY QUESTIONS are, “What is my history and how do I know?” and “What stories do other people tell about the past?” A focus in this unit will be on food, cooking methods, utensils and crockery. If you have some kitchen utensils from the past (artefacts) to examine, we would love to see them please!

YEAR 1

We have started our unit on 'Ways of Praying' in Religion this week. We have considered where we like to pray, the reasons why we pray, and we've discussed some of the prayers that we already know. Jesus also used to pray. He liked to pray alone in peaceful places, He liked to pray with others and give thanks to God (such as at The Last Supper) and He prayed in times of joy and pain. We are all encouraged to follow Jesus' example in connecting with God through prayer. In English we have shared the story Edward the Emu by Sheena Knowles and we've completed some activities related to the text. Our phonics focus for this week is 'ss'. As a 'fast finisher' activity, we've been testing each other on spelling Year 1 and Year 2 core list words on the mini whiteboards. It's a great way to develop automatic recall of words that we need to regularly incorporate into our writing tasks. In Maths this week we've been engaging in lots of fun, interactive, hands-on activities to learn about measuring length using informal units. So far this week we've been using blocks and paddlepop sticks to 'measure' classroom objects. We are careful not to leave 'gaps' or to overlap, so that our results are accurate! We've included some photos of our Maths activities to share with you. In History this week we've discussed what is meant by the terms: 'past', 'present' and 'future'. We illustrated diary entries to highlight something we did in the past, the stage of life we are at in the present, and our dreams for our future. Parents, if you know that your child's Homework folder is still at home, could you please send it back to school by this Friday 5th June? We still have a few folders missing. We will be updating folders and sending home new homework as of Tuesday, Week 7 (9/6). Thank you! 

YEAR 2

During last week and this week, Year 2 have been working on using Jump and Split strategies  to solve addition and subtraction sums. This has been challenging for some but I am impressed with the determination of the students wanting to achieve the correct answer. Keep it up Year 2.

This week we have started our new unit in Religion. Over the next few weeks we will study Mary and the Saints. We will take the time to find occasions that Mary is spoken about in the Bible and we will identify the qualities of Mary.

In Science the children are working towards creating their own sustainable house and backyard. At the moment we are investigating different things we could incorporate in our designs.

As part of last weeks at home learning task Miss Gallagher had the children writing their own lyrics to nursery rhymes and this week they will perform their master piece.

In English we have started looking at information reports and will spend the next few weeks learning to write information reports. We hope to be able to share some in the upcoming weeks.

From now on you will find Year 2 Homework tasks coming through Compass each Monday afternoon. Please let me know if you have any difficulty accessing the sites that the children need to use for the completion of their homework.

YEAR 3

Welcome back everyone! What a term it has been. We are into Week 6 already. Halfway through the term, with lots to do. We started our new Religion unit this week titled ‘Prayer’. We have learnt that there are different types of prayer – such as praise, thanks, penitential and petition. We are also learning about writing prayers of our own. In English, we are reading the book “The Tale of Despereaux’ by Kate DiCamillo. We are up to ‘Book the Fourth’ and can hardly wait to read ahead to discover what happens to the hero, Despereaux, and the villain, Roscuro. In Maths, we have been revising the different strategies for addition and subtraction. One of these strategies has been the ‘jump strategy’ which involves jumping along a number line by tens and ones. We are on the path to mastering this strategy. In History this week, we read about a celebration, which is focused in India, but also remembered by Hindus around the world. It is DIWALI, also known as the Festival of Lights. In Science, we are learning about ‘Solids, Liquids and Gas’. Last week our experiment showed the process by which a solid becomes a liquid. In Sport we are enjoying playing t-ball and the competition between the teams.

YEAR 4

In Religion, we have begun a unit about Prayer. We discussed our understanding of prayer and of the times and places we pray, the purpose of prayer and the people we pray with through our week. We have learnt there are four main types of prayer: praise, penitence, thanksgiving and petition. We each wrote a prayer, choosing one of these forms.

In English, we are learning about Figurative Language and we are focusing this week on similes. We have completed a variety of activities including finding similes in our novel and writing some of our own.

Our Persuasive Writing skills are coming along well and we had fun writing about the topic: Dogs make better pets than cats. Some of us changed the topic to Cats make better pets than dogs. Ask us about our point of view!

Our focus in Maths was 2D Shapes last week, and Subtraction this week. We learnt about polygons and quadrilaterals and determined rotational symmetry of many shapes. We had fun completing some online tasks but the best fun was creating various 2D shapes using other 2D shapes, e.g. two trapeziums made a hexagon, 6 triangles could form a hexagon. We are revising and practising trading in 3 digit and 4 digit numbers. We used Base 10 blocks to help us along before solving them with pen and paper.          

In History, we have learnt about the Voyage of Captain Cook, to study the Transit of Venus in 1769, and then his secret mission to discover the Great South Land. He came upon the east coast of Australia in April 1770. He declared it a Terra Nullius – meaning no people lived in the land. We all found that very surprising considering our Indigenous Australians have lived on our continent for 65 000 years!

We are now learning about the First Fleet and the terrible conditions in Britain which led to the transportation of convicts to Australia.

In Science, we continue to learn about States of Matter and we conducted a fair experiment to measure the time chocolate of various sizes took to melt. We really wanted to eat it! However, we found that smaller pieces melted more quickly than a bigger block of pieces. It was interesting to see, the following morning, that it had become solid again after a very cold night. This supported our understanding of temperature playing a part in changing the state of matter.

Learning is fun in Year 4!

YEAR 5/6

What a wonderful start to our first full week back at school with everyone in attendence! Year 6 led us in a beautiful liturgy to celebrate Pentecost. It was like we had had no break at all.

In Religion we are focussing on how we can be better stewards of creation and how we can start with small changes that hopefully will build and become good habits. We did an audit of the packages, and therefore ribbish, in our lunchboxes and decided on one small thing we could do individually to change the amount of rubbish we throw away. We also decide on something we could do as a group and decided on NO WASTE WEDNESDAY where we will try to bring everything for the day in reuseable containers. A challenge, but we are up for it!

In English we have been writing, revising, editing, and publishing discussions on the choices the main character in our novel was faced with. This has been a long process but the results have been worth it. The children can see for themselves how their writing has evolved and it is spurring them on to writing well from the beginning of a task. We then read the remainder of the chapter to find out what our character chose to do. he has been traversing Kampuchea for so long, but is now at the border. We can't wait to see if his brother is there to meet him!

In Maths we have been completing activities on positional and directional language and last week constructed and learnt about the Cartesian Plane, located the x-axis, which is horizontal, and the y-axis, which is vertical. We then used these axes, to describe various points in the plane using an ordered pair of numbers. We tried to trick our partners with our locations, but we are far too clever for that! This week we are revising different types of graphs as we learn how to read and interpret various types of graphical data.

In Geography we have shared the posters of our Asian country completed at home and found some interesting similarities and differences between the countries of Asia. We are now going to move onto looking at how we are connected to the rest of the world through migration.

In PDH, we have looked at our food intake for the last week (part home and part school) and were surprised by some of the positve food habits we have (the not so good ones became very obvious too) and we wrote down an individual plan to change one thing for this week to improve our food habits. Stay tuned for the results.

In Art, we have finally finished our beautiful cherry blossom trees. Aren't they amazing?!