Keep up-to-date with your child’s learning with these short weekly updates from their teachers. Click on the buttons below to go straight to your child’s class, or find out what others are up to!
Kindergarten
We had a wonderful second week, with the “Little Kindy” children joining us for their first week of school. This week we painted on Monday, baked bread on Tuesday, gardened with Annie and shaped beeswax on Wednesday, made paper turtles on Thursday and sewed felt fish on Friday. A very full and satisfying week all round.
The fulltime children are relaxing into the rhythms and routines of the Kindergarten, and the room is beginning to warm up with the sounds of their laughter and joy for each other.
This week’s story was a small puppet play called “The Littlest Turtle”, in keeping with our summertime beach themes, as well as touching on the courage and strength required to leave the comfort and security of the nest to venture out into the wider world.
Please put aside time to come to the Kindergarten Parent / Teacher night on Wednesday 18th February at 7 pm to learn more about your child’s day at school.
Francine
Class 1/2
Class 1/2 have been busy building friendships and enjoying our bush playground this week. The cool mornings have been a wonderful time to get active and practice skipping with ropes. It’s a delight to watch the children persevering with tricky things and see their joy of mastering 5 jumps (or more) in a row. Well done Class 1/2!
Our first Main Lesson exploring Form Drawing provided rhythm to our days. Recalling the previous day’s story, walking the form, drawing them in the air with both hands alternating, drawing them with feet on the ground, drawing with chalk on the ballcourt, pouring forms in water from a jug and finally drawing the form in our Main Lesson books.
The beginning of the year reveals a cherished tradition: Class 1 receive their very own crayons and Class 2 a new coloured pencil each day. I’m pleased to see the care and pride shown as the children continue their learning journey. Craft is already a regular, soothing activity in our room, Class 1 are carefully weaving their recorder cases and Class 2 began sewing their pencil cases or working on long stitch for craft bags.
As part of our Restorative Practice lessons, we enjoyed the picture book “Have You Filled Someone’s Bucket Today?”. It uses an invisible “bucket” to represent our self-esteem and happiness, aiming to teach that caring actions (filling) bring happiness to both the giver and receiver, while negative actions (dipping) hurt everyone. The children’s insights and observations are invaluable, and we are enjoying regular acts of kindness at school and hopefully at home also!
Looking forward to seeing everyone next Wednesday 11 February at 5 pm at our Meet the Teacher afternoon. Come have a cuppa and get to know not just about our classroom but the other lovely members of our community.
Kath
Class 3/4
Week 2 has been lovely in Class 3/4. They really are a delightful group who are connecting so beautifully.
We continued to work on our daily routine. Daily yarning circle, silent and peer reading, individual writing and settled work behaviours.
Highlights have been daily singing, spectacular Main Lesson pages, beautiful watercolour paintings of light and water, and botanical sketching in our first Permaculture lesson for the year with Annie.
Literacy support with Simone and Numeracy support with Minh also began this week. We are still matching children who work well together and at set times. This takes a bit of trial and error to get just right. We also had our first violin lesson on Thursday! Exciting times.
In Craft we started knitting neck warmers (buffs) in an array of gorgeous colours. Rowena has been helping children to cast on and get underway. We had our first girls’ and boys’ wellbeing groups with Soumya on Tuesday, which the children reported was lots of fun.
In Maths we continue to look at whole number and place value. How much is an 8 worth when it is 8 ones or 8 tens, 8 hundreds, 8 thousands? etc.
We nearly finished creating the world in our Main Lesson Hebrew Stories. Impressive effort in the first few days of the school year! So far there is darkness, light, sky, water, land, plants, stars, sun and moon. Each day set tasks are created slowly and well and then we sit back and admire our work and feel accomplished and say, “that’s enough for today”. Children ask to stand out the front with pride, to show their artistic drawn and written depictions, while we applaud their success. It is as adorable and special as it sounds.
Little by little we build our class community and create children in Class 3 or Class 4, slightly older and more mature version of themselves, but with the same essence of who they are. I have heard a report that Class 4 was seeming “better than expected”. Nice to know…
Warm regards Jeneva
Class 5/6
We’re finding our way into new routines and with that, the students are incredibly adaptable and gracious. They have been experiencing devising short creative writing pieces with various foci. We have been trying to become sensitive to our responses to the world through our senses and then using descriptive language to write in new ways.
The class is revising their times tables (and for some, still learning them). I have put them in pairs, and they practice a different multiplication table every few days. Please encourage your child to practice them at home. It could be better than counting sheep before sleep! The automatic recall is a very helpful skill throughout life!
We baked bread this week, which is not a regular activity in Class 5/6, but always a nice thing to do.
The children drew some great landscapes with charcoal which are up in our classroom if you’d like to see them.
Please return the yellow notes for our camp to Ganguddy ASAP. If you have tents that we could use, could you please let me know. Also, Swim Fun day is coming up too.
Lastly, please check our clothing policy. There are many children wearing a lot of black clothing. Our policy is that Class 6 can wear one item of black, but colours are preferable. Also, please save clothing with commercial logos/images on it for weekends.
With appreciation and thanks
Have a great weekend,
Julie
