It sounds like the children had a lovely break and they have come back refreshed and ready for the new term.

This term we welcome our student teacher Kelsey. She will be with us for 6 weeks as she completes her final year teaching practicum.

The Police Tattoo this week was fantastic, with all of the children enjoying at least a couple of the performances. It was lovely to see your children moving to the beat of the drums and playing their imaginary instruments along with the bands. They were all really well behaved. It was particularly pleasing to see the way they looked out for each other on the journey, particularly during the train change overs.

In maths we are working on subtraction, focussing on remembering how to set it out horizontally and vertically. In English we have introduced a second genre. Last term we focussed on Recount. This term we have begun Narrative. The parts of a narrative are : orientation, complication and resolution. It is important that students know and understand these terms as it helps them to plan their stories, but also helps them to locate information in a text for reading comprehension. This will be tested in the Year 3 NAPLAN tests, which some of the class will be doing next year.

Our new IBPYP inquiry is titles Give and Take. It is all about perspectives and the value of differing opinions. We will be spening a couple of weeks looking at how this relates to self, a couple focussing on our local community (which is where we will begin planning for our major overhaul of the amphitheatre area,) and a couple of weeks looking globally. We began by looking at some optical illusions and noting that not everyone sees exactly the same thing. More on this later.

The children are learning about the IB attitudes this term, which complement the Learner Profiles. Look for a display in our classroom over the next few weeks.

There was great excitement this week at the discovery that our class pets, ‘The girls’, had laid eggs. We have placed the eggs in a separate container buried in sand and are eagerly awaiting any changes to them 🙂 Don’t forget that if you would like to look after the girls for a weekend you just need to see me or drop me a line. We have now caught up and there is not currently a waiting list for this privilege.