It has been another busy and exciting fortnight at Macarthur Street. It was fantastic to see so many mothers and special people in our students’ lives attend our Mother’s Day Breakfast last Friday.
It was a wonderful opportunity to come together and celebrate the amazing women who make up our school community.
This week we have been working so hard on our writing! We have begun using a kernel stem to build a sentence from, using a ‘where’ and ‘when’. We have practiced writing our high frequency words into an independent piece about Ken the rat.
It’s been so lovely to see students apply what they have been learning and begin to piece together the puzzle of letters/sounds/words onto paper!
It’s been a wonderfully busy time in Grade One, filled with rich learning experiences across all areas of the curriculum.
In Literacy, we’ve been exploring the different spellings of the /ee/ sound, looking at examples such as treat, she, key, sleep, and happy. Our writing focus has been on developing strong sentences using conjunctions like because and so, helping students extend their ideas and explain their thinking more clearly.
In Numeracy, we’re continuing to consolidate our understanding of two-digit numbers and exploring addition facts using number bonds.
Amidst all this exciting learning, we always make time to enjoy our class novel. This term, we’ve been reading FING by David Walliams. The students absolutely love classroom reading time and are all thoroughly engaged and invested in this hilarious story. To extend this excitement, students have been creating their own imaginative and hilarious monster characters, making our literacy lessons even more creative and fun.
Grade 2 students have been working hard over the last 2 weeks on increasing their fact fluency in Maths. After completing a daily review on content that has previously been taught, students verbally practise saying number facts aloud.
We are continually practising different combinations to make our addition and subtraction facts, known facts. Known facts are where the students no longer need fingers to work out an answer, they just know it and can instantly recall it. This week all students were able to answer all 32 questions in under a minute! Amazing work, Grade 2's.
This week, we have continued to investigate aspects of war. As a part of our learning, we have been reading about Simpson and his donkey. Jack Simpson was from England but always wanted to travel the world. At the age of seventeen, he found himself working across Australia in several different jobs. After getting homesick, and then hearing that England was at war, he wanted to go home. He ended up enlisting in the Australian Army and was shipped back to Europe. He found himself on the slopes of the Gallipoli Peninsula. One day, he found a stray donkey which he took in as his own.
This became a way for him to transport injured soldiers back to camp – all of which took place under dangerous conditions - in and amongst enemy gunfire and aggression. In the space of twenty-four days, Jack Simpson and his donkey rescued over three hundred men.
What another wonderful fortnight in Grade 5/6. Our students have been working on writing a persuasive argument ‘Every Australian citizen should have been required to contribute to the war effort, whether through work, rationing, or military service.’ There have been some fantastic arguments both for and against. We have had some wonderful discussions relating to World War 2. Last week we made a timeline of the Pacific Front starting with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ending with the formation of the United Nations in 1945.
This timeline lead us into this week where we have been learning about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Some interesting facts we learnt include that when the USS Arizona was bombed it took 9 minutes for the ship to sink killing 1177 people. Of these 1177 people over 900 are still entombed on the USS Arizona to this day. There is now a monument constructed above the sunken battleship to honour those who lost their lives.
In the Art room, we are working on our paper folding, cutting, and stretching through the construction of 2D and 3D sculptures.
If you have any old newspapers, you could donate to the art room it would be greatly appreciated.
In, Foundation - Year 2 we are kicking off the Term developing and refining our kicking, jumping and dodging skills. I’ve attached some ways students can practice their kicking at home.
In Year 3-6 we are working on our map reading and navigation skills by participating in Orienteering. Getting students to help you navigate to venues is a great way for them to practise their navigation skills. Remember we only ever get “geographically embarrassed” and never “lost”. 😊
Happy Birthday to the students who have celebrated their birthday in the last week or will celebrate their birthday in the coming days.
