Class News: Week 5, Term 3
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/Boronia Room
The Bee incursion on Wednesday with the Richmond Agriculture School of Excellence, was a very full and interesting day. The Kindy children did so well staying engaged with the content, remaining ever ready and enthusiastic to ask or answer any question. I was amazed by all the different interesting facts that the children knew about the natural world.
The day began with the children testing soil samples in small groups around the school. Healthy soil is important for healthy plants, insects and animals. So we wanted to know if the soil at our school tested as more acid or more alkaline from the base line of neutral. Our group found the soil to be a PH of 5.5 and 6, so the soil was more on the alkaline side rather than acid. We also attempted to count the number of creatures present in an allocated area – this proved a real challenge as the little insects moved so fast!
In the middle session we joined up with Class 1/2 and learned more about bees in particular. We learned that worker bees are all female and that bees collect pollen and nectar. While bees collect pollen they also pollinate plants, the small hairs covering their bodies help to carry out this important job. The children carried out a range of different activities, including looking at different flowers under a microscope, to see the different patterns that make up their surfaces, helping them to attract the bees to their pollen.
In the afternoon the children made an individual six-sided (hexagonal) cell. Then all the individual cells were offered up and joined together to form the perfect non-overlapping, tessellating bee hive structure. This was the perfect way to end our day together.
Our special thanks go out to the three teachers (Chris, Joe and Joey) for coming to our school and sharing their expertise and knowledge with us for Science Week.
Warm wishes, Francine and Maya
Class 1/2
It’s been an industrious week: we had our ‘No bees, no future’ incursion, which was informative, engaging and fun.
We’ve also been listening to the retelling of some fairy tales, which allows the listener to go on journeys, feeling the tension along the way, then the resolution, whilst experiencing the paths that life sometimes offers us (on various levels), at times.
We’ve been reading the analogue clock and many of the stories also engage with that theme. If you want to support your child’s time telling literacy at home, please do!
Just a reminder to read to your children on a regular basis and listen to them as they read to you. Take a breath and don’t jump in with a correction immediately (give it 10 seconds before you do), but of course help them when they ask. Learning to read and then reading to learn is our journey. Much of our confidence is built during this process.
Lastly, many children are bringing toys to school, often under the guise of ‘news’. Please leave toys at home.
Unfortunately, Meredith is unwell. We hope she gets better super quick!
Have a great weekend, Julie
Class 3/4
This week we continued our Main Lesson on Heroes of the Old Testament. The children have been hearing various stories – the story of Joshua and Rahab, the story of Samuel (and David and Goliath). We worked a lot on sentence structure – in particular using interesting openers, verbs and adverbs.
On Wednesday we had our Bee incursion, “No Bees, No Future”. The children transformed into little scientists for the day – testing the pH of the soil around our school, recording insects found, then using various microscopes. Quiz them on something they learned about bees!
From there, we went more global, learning about orangutans and their fragile natural habitat. We are entering the Orangutan Art competition to raise funds and awareness for these critically endangered animals.
On Friday we welcome Isabelle back which we’ve been very excited about! Have a lovely weekend.
Warm wishes, Soumya
Class 5/6
We’ve been fortunate to have scientists from Richmond Agricultural College come out for the day on the Wednesday of Science Week and take us through the No Bees, No Future program.
Leading their Peer Support groups, Class 5/6 students tested the soil pH in three sites around different zones as soil health is so important for growing a variety of flowers suitable for pollinators and insects.
We were excited to learn that there is evidence of the visiting of blue-banded bees in warmer weather! Class 5/6 helped their groups fill out a procedural sheet detailing the experiments’ aim, hypothesis, variables, equipment list, method, results and conclusion.
In our main lesson we’ve been reviewing our skills in using an Atlas and reading coordinates, and drew a map of Australia. One of our lesson goals is to learn every state and territory and their capital city, as well as oceans, ranges, rivers and other features. Students have been learning about important sites where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been caretaking Country for over 70,000 years. As a maths focus we have been looking at rounding numbers at the point of various place value, and continuing a daily task of applying a range of questions and mathematical vocabulary to the number de jour – the students are getting quite quick with this!
Would you like some silkworm eggs? When the mulberry trees start shooting, our eggs stored from last year’s silkworms will wake up. Please let me know if you would like some – lots of fun for the family (make sure you know where your local mulberry trees are – they’re pretty hungry critters!).
Just a reminder if your child needs support with the Ancient Rome project, please email me. Students also have the novel to read at home, A Waltz With Matilda – many are making excellent progress and discussing details at break times! It would be ideal if all students have finished reading this book after next weekend, as we will begin an in-class group novel study in Week 7.
Have a great weekend, Steph and Lee