The children are very fired up about writing at the moment. This week they wrote stories about a turtle, a flag and a person. They will be added to the “Our Stories” page as soon as I get time to type them 🙂

On that note… I’ve bitten off more than I can chew I think!!! if you are able to help type them up I would love your help either on Wednesdays or Thursdays. You could either come to school to do it or I could send them home for you to do at home and email to me.

Each week we spend lots of time reading various things. One of the activities we do is called Guided Reading. Children are divided into groups. While one group works with the teacher, the others participate in all sorts of activities that involve reading. Here are some photos to give you an idea of what this looks like.

Have you seen this website? It has lots of free tips and practice sheets:

http://www.stabilo.com.au/easyergo/index.html

What a busy few weeks we have had!

The special lunch that we held last Friday week was a big success. All of the children managed to calculate the cost of their lunch, although a few did only allow for margarine on 1 slice of bread 🙂

We have now finished our unit of work on money and the children completed a test today to show their growth over the unit. Most children made good progress. It would still be really beneficial if you could involve them in ‘real’ money tasks when they are with you, especially giving change up to amounts of $1.00.

This week we are moving on to graphing in maths.

Our current PYP unit is to do with Imagination. We are really enjoying letting our imaginations run wild! Some of the things that we have done so far include: invent a ‘trancapar’, draw a ‘giraforilla’, design and make a bridge out of straws in small groups.

Today we have begun to write narratives about the day we drank a ‘potion’ that made us as small as a mouse.

Last week we spent Wednesday afternoon learning about safely entering and exiting cars, especially at the front of our school. Hopefully you have all seen the yellow TravelSmart folder and have done the homework with your child.

Don’t forget to tease your brain 🙂 There’s a new challenge waiting for you on the Brainteaser page.

Have a great week.

Didn’t the children all look fantastic today? We had about 6 Batmen and 3 witches with a smattering of other characters. We have been doing activities every day this week related to different Book Week books. This morning the roll book task was for the children to drag their name under their favourite book. Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley was the outright winner.

We also solved our mystery today after a week of checking finger prints, tyre tracks, tooth marks and textas.

Nex tweek we will begin a new unit of inquiry related to our imaginations.

Well done to all of the children who have visited the blog and emailed me (or written up) their answers to the brain teasers. I’ll be updating the question later tonight 🙂
This has been a busy week.
On Tuesday we wrote to an Australian Olympic athlete. Some of the letters were very good, and clearly showed how interested the children are in their chosen sport. We are hoping to get at least a few replies like we have in previous years.
We also began our unit of Inquiry into Markets. Thank you to all of the people who have offered to help on our trip to the market and with the cooking. We have been amazed at the level of response for this.
In maths we have been practicing addition of tens and units, some people have been exchanging and some have even been working with thousands and hundreds too.
Today we made some Japanese carp kites in art and learnt many different ways to join popsticks and straws in technology. Hopefully we’ll build up quite a repertoire so that we’ll be less likely to rely on the warm glue guns!
Our class has also been learning how to participate in uninterrupted, silent, sustained reading, (USSR). We mastered it in the first few minutes, and already, after 2 days, our record for remaining totally silent while reading is over 5 minutes! We can be nearly silent for about twenty minutes! The main objectives of the USSR are:

to improve concentration span
to provide an adult model of reading
to provide a positive book experience
exposure to a wide range of literary genres
to help form good reading habits for extensive reading
to increase desire to read on their own during their free time
to develop a life-long love of reading

Last week we continued to learn about subtraction and narrative. In PYP we looked at perspectives and made a large picture as a team, as well as rewriting Jack and the Beanstalk from the Giant’s perspective.

The disco was a big hit, with all of the students participating for at least some of the time. It was nice for them to have the option of leaving when they’d had enough.

This week we will be beginning a unit of work in mathematics on mapping. We will begin by looking at the different types of map, so if you have any at home your child might like to bring it along to share. It might be a map of the zoo, a house plan, a map of Australia etc. We will be continuing our PYP unit but considering it from a local perspective. We will be beginning the process of interviewing locals. You may be aware that Bev and I have redeveloped an area of the school in the past few years. We began with the sandpit area, and last year created the sensory garden. This year’s major project will be the amphitheatre area, so we will begin planning for this during this phase of our unit of inquiry. In English we will be continuing to learn about narrative.

Hope you all had a lovely Mother’s Day and enjoyed the small gift that your child made for you at school.

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.

As you know Bev and I went to a course on this on Monday. It was very interesting and we are already implementing some of the exercises with the children. (There are 26 in all.) We do 1 set 3 times a day – at the beginning, after recess and after lunch, as well as others throughout the day to prepare for certain lessons. I am already noticing a more settled class and hope to see other benefits in the future.

Here are the exercises that we do 3 times a day.

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