We have had a very busy but wonderful term. The children have experienced a variety of educational opportunities. We’ve had the Life Education Van, Book Week, Science Week and our excursion. We still have our first aid course to complete in Week 10.

Our excursion was a real highlight. The children gained some very valuable insights into waste in our local area from our visit to the Red Hill Waste Facility. I hope you enjoyed the photos shared on our blog and I hope the children have shared some knowledge with you about what they learnt. They have just completed a report on the Red Hill Waste Facility. I was so impressed with the standard of information they have presented. These are on display in the classroom ready for our Learning Journey next week.

Our Learning Journey will be next Tuesday 18^th September between 2pm – 3.30pm. May I extend a warm invitation to you all to come and see what your children have been working on this term. They will have many activities prepared to share with you.

As we move into the final weeks of the term we are wrapping up a number of topic areas.

English

·       Reading Strategies – sequencing, concluding, fact or opinion, summarising and main idea. We will be looking at using these strategies in the context of both text and short films.

• ·       Grammar – revising simple, compound and complex sentences and the conjunctions used to write these sentences. Tenses, the use of determiners (a/an), homophones (their/there/they’re, too/two/to, where/wear/we’re, your/you’re, it’s/its) and homographs (bat/bat)
• ·       Punctuation - Using commas for a list of items and for a pause, exclamation marks, question marks, quotation marks, ellipses, apostrophe for ownership and contractions.
• ·       Spelling - phonemes er, age, ry, est, our, ise, ant, age, e, al, ex, a, I, au, ie along with some spelling rules
• ·       Speaking & Listening – Science and HASS presentation that will be prepared during class time.
• ·       Writing – Poetry, writing a Procedure and Explanation

You will find photos of some of the work produced in Literacy already posted on our blog.

Mathematics

• ·       Number and Algebra - fractions, money, addition and subtraction within 1000, multiplication and division (facts of 2, 3, 5 & 10)
• ·       Measurement - time, mapping and directional language, symmetry and angles
• ·       Statistics and Probability - chance

Our Karate times tables challenge has been a huge success. Many children in the class were challenged with the goal of mastering their times tables at the conclusion of last semester. Everyone has embraced the challenge and are working towards moving their way up the Karate belt ladder.

Science

I hope the children have shared with you their new knowledge from our STEM investigation regarding food and temperatures inside lunchboxes. You would have seen the lunchbox they designed and created. Photos are on the blog in case you missed it. The children have recorded their data on line graphs, table graphs and in written observations. All our investigation experiment record sheets are on display in the classroom. The children will be able to explain them to you during the Learning Journey.

Literacy Pro

You probably know that Literacy Pro has been a big success. Your children have embraced the program and are progressing beautifully. Many children are starting to achieve their Bronze Certificates now, an admirable milestone. We have had the goal of improving our pass rate for quizzes this term. We tried to get our pass rate up to 90%. We did improve by 2% up to 83% with the following strategies

• ·       Read the questions twice
• ·       Read the whole book carefully
• ·       Check for the answers in the book
• ·       Finish all 10 questions

We will be setting a new goal early next term to improve our Literacy Pro statistics.

I would like to wish you all a lovely holiday and look forward to everyone returning for Term 4 refreshed and ready to learn.