School Policy Input

The School Council is inviting community input on a number of policies relating to child safety, complaints, visitors, volunteers, enrolment and Aboriginal and Torres Strait learning, safety and wellbeing. If you would like to be involved and provide input please contact Christian (christianjclark@gmail.com) or Emma (Emma.Griffiths2@education.vic.gov.au) and we’ll get you a copy of the policies, or you can pick up copies at the office. We may all get together next week or you can simply provide feedback by email. Thanks, Christian, School Council

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

28/10 – Halloween Dress Up & Special Lunch

1/11 – Melbourne Cup Day

4/11 – School assembly 2.30-3.30pm

11/11 – Student free day

15/11 – Ocean swim – Life Saving Victoria – 5/6

24/11 – ‘The Final Word’ G6 Cyber safety

25/11 – School assembly 2.30-3.30pm

1/12 – Elephant Ed – 5/6

1/12 – Annual School concert

7/12 – Grade 6 Graduation

8/12 – Elephant Ed – 5/6

12-14/12 – 5/6 Camp

14/12 – Gr 6 Big Day Out

16/12 – Christmas themed bake sale

16/12 – Grade 6 leavers assembly 2.30-3.30pm

20/12 – Last day of Term 4

Let’s start off with a bang and talk about how AMAZING the Pevan & Sarah concert truly was! The excitement on the preps faces as we entered the theatre was priceless. Pevan & Sarah have been a big part of our classroom and to finally see them in ‘real life’ was a dream come true…especially for Mrs. C, who got to rock out on stage alongside Sarah. The day was such a success because of our wonderful preps. They were in every was fabulous, so much so that our cheeks hurt from beaming with pride!

All the singing and dancing must have exhausted many of the preps as they fell asleep on the trek home, even Mrs. G had a quick nap on the bus.

Reading this week has been so much fun! We have been exploring outside character traits. As we listened closely to Koala Lou’s, Mr Twit’s, and the Beast’s appearance in the text we drew a picture of what we were visualising. Our drawings were pretty spot on with including all of the outside character traits!

Our Writing structure looked a little different this week as we combined our Writing space with Respectful Relationships. Once buddied up, we interviewed our partners recognising and writing about their needs and interests. Don’t forget to come in and check out your child’s writing in the classroom, we publish a new writing piece every Friday! Rightfully so, the preps are extremely proud of their writing. Ms Preece and Mrs G have been getting weekly visits from some super proud preps who have been showcasing their published masterpieces!

Fork was our SMART Spelling word this week, which of course meant we had to make ‘Forky’ from Toy Story! We loved that our Forky’s all looked so wonderfully different!

In Maths, we were working on addition. This week, we focussed on ways we can solve math problems using concrete materials. Even if we knew the answer, we wanted to see the preps show their thinking. How did you get that answer? What did you use to support your thinking? Can you show me how you got that answer?! Were just some of the questions asked during Maths this week. Sometimes it’s not all about having the right answer, but the journey we take to get there.

Supporting the children to utilise different strategies will help when faced with more challenging problems. Number lines, 100 charts, mini whiteboards, counters and unifix were just some of the materials we used to problem solve.

That’s it from Mrs C and Miss H, we will hand it over to the preps now to talk about their week!

Have a wonderful weekend 😊

News from the Preps:

 “Pevan and Sarah was so much fun, we got to watch them in real life. We got to see Lilly be a rockstar, Mrs C’s guitar was making a bad noise, she was so jealous that her guitar didn’t work. It was my most favourite day ever.

We loved making forky for our word of the week, there are 3 sounds in fork.

We have been adding numbers together in maths, we can also call this plus.”

We have been busy as minibeasts in the 1/2’s this week. In writing we have been exploring how to generate ideas so that we can avoid experiencing the dreaded writer’s block. Plenty of narrative planning and exploration has been done working with ‘seeds’. These are picture references to jump start the creative process. In reading we have been developing our understanding of figurative language. We have created simile monsters and sought to identify metaphors within our mentor texts. Maths this week has served as a turning point for most as it is now our third week refining our understanding of place value. There has been a plethora of lightbulb moments which has been a delight to teach. In inquiry, students have been given the task of exploring their own backyard for minibeasts. Please ask your child about the map they have brought home and the predictions they have made about what they might find. Good luck and we can’t wait to see what you all may find at home!

Week 3 has brought us some much needed sunshine, allowing for more teaching and learning opportunities outside. It has been wonderful!!

Reading

This week in reading, students have continued to work on inferring skills. Using our mentor text ‘The Rabbits’ by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, students have been listening to fragments of the story to create a mental picture of what they are hearing. Students tune into the key vocabulary and apply any prior knowledge to make meaning from the text. This is a valuable comprehension skill to develop as it helps readers to analyse important ideas and themes from texts.

Writing

The students have continued multi-genre writing based on their chosen topic. The demolition around the school has provided some students with the perfect idea for a creative writing piece as well as persuasive and non-fiction informational writing. Next week we will be learning how to you quotation marks, and speech tags (they said, Ryan shouted, Henry replied etc) and applying paragraphs in our writing.

Maths

In Maths, we have been working on building our mental and written strategies to help with subtraction. We have encouraged students to explain their thinking and to share which strategy works best for them and why. We have set some new Mathletics tasks to align with the learning in the classroom. Please ensure your child is setting aside 15 minutes, 3 times a week to work through these activities online.

Assessment

As you may know, this term is quite a busy term for assessments. Your child will be completing standardised testing (PAT) for Reading and Maths during week 3 and 4.

Have a wonderful weekend,

¾ Team

WARNING WARNING

Our own Mr. Clingin has learnt first hand the dangers of trying to fly paper planes in the classroom.