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

As part of Book Week we had illustrator and author Melinda Kerr join us at school on Monday, to read her children’s book “Digger Gets An Itch”. Melinda grew up in the mountains and went to school at Mt Victoria. She loves animals and decided to write a story about wombats and how we can all help them if we happen to see them looking itchy or unwell. We want to thank Melinda for sharing her love for writing and wombats with us.

On Thursday everyone brought in their books and came to school dressed in costumes, disguised as their favourite book characters. We headed up to the ball court for a book parade, where all the book characters mingled and showed their books. There was a wonderful variety of costumes, characters and books presented across the classes. It was lots of fun, as so many children got involved and joined in!

The Early Childhood Staff will be hosting the Sydney Regional Meeting of the Australian Association for Rudolf Steiner Early Childhood Education (SECA) in the Kindergarten Room this Saturday. We are looking forward to showing our school and its beautiful surrounds to the visiting teachers and educators from the Sydney region.

A reminder that the school is holding a beautiful Spring Fair on Saturday 10th September 10am to 2pm. Please come along and enjoy the day and invite your friends!

Enjoy the weekend, and enjoy a book together,

Francine and Maya

---

Class 1/2

We’ve been in the land of fairy tales. Travelling on journeys, bumping into tricky situations along the way and meeting resolutions which mostly work out for protagonists in some way or another. The children listen attentively to these tales, engaging with the characters and their obstacles. They accept the unexplained and, at times, open-ended-ness of the story.

This week we drew our version of Orangutans, which Karen has kindly scanned and sent into an art competition fundraiser. We focused on the fact that by sending in our pictures, we are helping the Orangutans, more than the competition itself.

The children have been enjoying their free creative play, which is always a constructive way to explore the world and friendships. Our Book Week parade was lots of fun. Thank you for supporting your children to wear very imaginative costumes and enabling them to appreciate the world through books.

Circus is going well, as we prepare for our Saturday 10th September SPRING FAIR.

Have a lovely weekend,

Julie and Meredith

---

Class 3/4

How lovely to be back in the classroom!

This week we’re listening to more stories from the Old Testament: the stories of Samson and Delilah, Queen Esther and Daniel.

We composed recounts using connectives, good sentence starters and plenty of adjectives and adverbs.

The book parade was a great success and the children came dressed as dictionaries, scientists, characters from their favourite books, even Karl Marx paid us a visit. As it happens, Karl Marx grew up in Trier where I come from.

We saw beautiful handmade swords, daggers and walking sticks and it was fun staying in character when we were back in the classroom.

Have a great weekend,

Isabelle aka Pippi Longstocking & Holly aka Mary Poppins

---

Class 5/6

We spent a very enjoyable morning this week listening to the amazing topics and research of the students as they presented their Ancient Rome projects – thank you all for supporting this!

We were very impressed with the quality of the questions and comments after each presentation – these were consistently insightful, curious and demonstrated great listening skills and a connection to their learning.

It has been a wonderful week of celebrating literacy at our school, with visiting author Melinda Kerr leading the students through the process of writing their own short story on Monday, and of course our Book Week costume parade on Thursday. It was lovely to see the students engage with characters and retain their connection to the joy of immersing themselves in a story!

Many have been enjoying a chat here and there about story events and their progress in reading the class novel A Waltz With Matilda at home – could you please encourage your child to finish the book over the weekend and bring it on Monday so that we can begin our in-class group novel study projects – many thanks!

During our Maths Practice lessons we have been focusing on prime and composite numbers, and finding the lowest and highest common factors of a pair of numbers. This is highlighting for some students that they need to complete their learning of the multiplication tables so that the process becomes more comfortable and also speedy.

In our Main Lesson we have been hearing about Sir Edmund Barton the first Prime Minister of Australia, Catherine Helen Spence and her role in the push for a vote for women, and Sir Henry Parkes’ speech on the need for Federation. The latter called for unification of the colonies towards a cohesive defense system, a common rail gauge for the transport of goods and also people across the vast continent, and a national constitution and government.

Next week among our topics we will hear about the recent renewed calls for change to our constitution where the Aboriginal people were previously not included, as well as biography and an art study of the works of Albert Namatjira. We will be contrasting his style to that of Sidney Nolan.

A reminder please that each student needs to have and wear a hat at school during every playtime.

Have a lovely weekend,

Steph and Lee