Well, it wasn’t the usual start to the school year, however Year 3, Room 1 have wasted no time in organising themselves and their belongings. Everyone has started the year with a ‘Growth Mindset’ and written themselves a goal to work towards.
The students have also participated in a range of activities to get to know one another and their teacher. A couple of our favourite activities included, creating a ‘WANTED’ poster for a class mate, and ‘Get to know the teacher by only asking a yes or no question’!
Alongside the fun, the students have tackled all their learning goals to their absolute best. Immersing themselves in four square writing, discussing states of matter in science, and drawing crazy pictures using odd and even number concepts were amongst the many learning activities that we all enjoyed. We are all looking forward to a fabulous and fun learning journey!
Room 2 has had a tremendous start to the school year – we are off and running!
The students are all enthusiastic and focused on their learning and they are an absolute pleasure to teach.
This term we have begun building a classroom culture for success. We are developing growth mindsets. We are also learning how to build and maintain caring relationships with others – all this encouraged and supported by the wonderful parents of Room 2.
This is what we have been getting up to so far this term:
English
The students have been learning how to create paragraphs using topic sentences and main ideas. They are also adding ‘extra information’ to their paragraphs by asking themselves who, what, when, how and where questions. Here is an extract from Lucy:
The Most Amazing Fair
“At the fair there is always lots of food for people to eat. Lots of people eat cotton candy. It is amazingly pink. It looks and tastes like clouds. People also buy popcorn. It is a weird shape and it’s crunchy and hard but it still tastes delicious. Cool drinks are great! They are fizzy and liquidy. It fizzes slowly down into your tummy.”
Maths
We have been building on our place value and partitioning knowledge. It has been fun using the MAB blocks to determine the difference between two numbers.
History
Civics and Citizenship is the topic being studied this term. This aligns very nicely with our school values of inclusivity, respect, resilience and responsibility.
Science
We have embarked on our Science topic for this term. The students will get a deeper understanding of Biological Science, minibeasts and their habitats.
Health
We are looking at how success, challenge and failure strengthen personal identities. We are examining our self-talk, persistence and how we meet new challenges.
ICT
The students are learning how to open a new word document, and most importantly, save it successfully to their personal file.
This term in English, students have been learning about letter writing. In order for students to ‘buy into’ any concept they must understand how it relates to the real world. To this end, an authentic writing experience was created by affording students the opportunity to connect with a Pen Pal student from Sydney, Australia. This task provided students a chance to practically apply their learnt knowledge and for them to practice their writing and reading skills.
Digital Technologies (Coding)
In Digital Technologies students have been acquiring knowledge and understanding of digital systems, data and the processes associated with creating digital solutions. Within this unit of work, students were presented with the task of programming a robot named Dash to accurately complete a marked-out course. A task such as this contributes towards the creation of a fun hands on learning environment, whilst offering an opportunity to further enhance their creativity and problem-solving skills.
Team Building in Room 22
The skills learned from team building are important parts of personal and group development in children. During team building activities, students have the chance to communicate with each other and work towards a common goal. By practicing being an effective team member and team leader, children develop confidence in their own abilities. Learning how to work with others and communication are important by-products of team building.
Game Based Learning
In Room 22 the teaching and learning cycle of Mathematics incorporates a game-based approach. Students consolidate their learnt mathematical concepts by creating and playing math games. Opportunities such as these assist students in exploring fundamental number concepts, such as the counting sequence, one-to-one correspondence, and computation strategies. Mathematical games encourage students to explore number combinations, place value, patterns, and other important mathematical concepts. Further, they afford opportunities for students to deepen their mathematical understanding and reasoning.
The Year 3s in Room 4 have had a very busy and productive first term. In 2018, Year 3s across the state have increased their time dedicated to learning additional languages and all schools are now scheduling and reporting on Technologies over the year. This has increased our French session times and led to Coding being introduced earlier for our students.
Writing expectations increase every year and our students are being taught with strategies from both Talk 4 Writing and Seven Steps to help them further develop and improve their writing skills. It has been great to see some of the light bulb moments for students when texts are broken down and re-explained in new ways.
Leveled reading and spelling groups continue to be a part of our Year 3 teaching program to ensure all students are challenged adequately. With our first ever NAPLAN testing coming up also, students have been gaining a better understanding of the testing format through weekly support sessions.
Music opportunities have expanded for our Year 3 students and we now have class members participating in specialized Violin and Viola sessions in addition to their Music specialist sessions. Our Taikoz drumming incursion was a great success and students enjoyed applying their musical knowledge and participating on the drums.
Also, over the last few weeks students have been attending swimming lessons during the mornings to help keep them safe and knowledgeable around water. As we finish our busy and longer Term 1 it’s a great time for a holiday and refresh to prepare for what will also be a very busy Term 2. We are looking forward to seeing even more great work from our fantastic learners as the year continues!
We have been very busy in Room 6 this term. We started off the year with a Teddy Bears Picnic which we shared with some of the other junior classes and our special bear friends.
Each fortnight we tell news. We have a special topic and prepare what we will say at home. When it was Marley’s turn for news he told us about Chinese New Year. He did a special Lion dance for us. It was very interesting learning about the traditions which go with the Chinese New Year.
During writing we are learning to write Persuasive Text. Sam’s dad, Duncan knows all about persuading people in his job as a lawyer. He came and spoke to us about persuading. After he had spoken to us we had a try for ourselves. Half the class prepared some ideas to convince our friends about which were best, cats or dogs. The other half of the class thought of arguments about whether skateboards or scooters were best.
