Photo of the week – Term 3 Week 4

Posted on August 11, 2022 by Newsletter Ed

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Preschool News Week 4 Term 3

Posted on August 11, 2022 by katrinaa

Hello everyone,

It’s been a great week in preschool, everyone has now recovered from COVID and returned healthy, happy, and raring to play. It’s been lovely having Michael and Lisa back, too, we all really missed them!

We’ve had a wonderful time with adventures around Currambena and the wider community. On Wednesday we headed up to Lane Cove Library to have librarian Sue read us many stories about Pandas. We also joined Vinnie and Emma’s class this week for a collaborative unit on astronomy. Each day throughout this term we’ll be holding an astronomy lesson, and once or twice a week this will be in Emma and Vinnie’s Kindergarten/Year 1 class. We had Buddies on Tuesday with Wendy’s class, first we had a meeting to make sure everyone was comfortable with their buddy. Some of the preschool children who have been reluctant in the past to take part have now joined in with peers. Wendy’s class has also been kindly running a few skipping games for the preschool children to take part in.

The new Octonauts equipment is leading to lots of collaborative play in the construction corner. It’s so lovely to see the preschool community being so inclusive in their play.

There’s been some great successes involving risky play and challenging gross motor experiences on the climbing equipment at Currambena. We’ve got some very keen and astute preschool children who are very determined to make it to the top of the tree cubby house and across the monkey bars.

We’ve continued to focus on health and hygiene in preschool, practicing how to wash and dry your hands effectively. A friendly reminder to all families that with the UV index now 3 or above for part of the day every day we need families to pack a hat for their child, we’ll also be asking children to apply sunscreen.

That’s it for this week!

Love

Michael, Lisa and Katrina

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Emma and Vinnie’s group Term 3 Week 4

Posted on August 11, 2022 by Emma

Hi everyone,

We’ve almost completed all our our parent/teacher interviews and they’ve been wonderful, thank you! It’s been great to talk about home reading as well, with many of you, it’s great that the students are keen to share their learning and keep practising at home.

It was lovely to go to the park again on Tuesday afternoon. We had a great time joining up with Jess’s class to play and also to practise skipping – ready for Jump Rope for Heart next week. The key is to jump AFTER the rope hits the ground, haha.

Thank you, Katrina and Michael and Lisa, for sharing an amazing lesson about Stars with us, we’re looking forward to working together on a joint Science unit with the preschool crew. A lot of the children remembered facts learned from being a part of the unit last year – now they have a chance to experience it again as elders and can be role models and help the younger preschoolers.

We’ve been learning our new set of letters in phonics/reading groups: v w y z j n k e. Now we know almost all the single sounds/most of the alphabet, so that’s exciting! We’ve been modelling other reading “fix up” strategies like stopping if a word doesn’t make sense, predicting/making a good guess about what it could be, going back and rereading.

We’re building on our writing and aiming to write three factual sentences to name, classify, and describe our dinosaur, which this week was the Stegosaurus. We did some dinosaur craft as well – cutting and pasting skills are coming along!!!

Our 100 days of learning party was such a success, thank you everyone for sharing in the beautiful celebration of the students’ amazing growth and development over the last 100 days.

Love, Emma and Vinnie

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From Jess Term 3, Week 4

Posted on August 11, 2022 by jessk

Dear Families,
The children have worked very hard this week and begun exploring narratives with a focus on writing. They agreed it was time to declare “down with boring sentences!” and instead create scintillating sentences that engage and entertain. Together we transformed the simple sentence “The wolf ate the bunny then fell asleep in the woods” into “The beautiful wolf ate the chocolate bunny then fell asleep in the smelly woods”. My attempt at drawing the image of the scene that the new sentence evoked was not very successful, but luckily Meg and her artistic skills came to the rescue. In literacy stations I’ve introduced a simple Chromebook programs to assist with learning high frequency words, and in maths -  an iPad game to improve maths fluency. We’ve also begun working with word problems in maths and have shared strategies that might help us solve them, including drawing the problem, using counters, and counting in groups (or skip counting).

For sport on Tuesday, we joined Vinnie and Emma’s group at the park where we practised our skipping skills in preparation for “Jump Rope for Heart”. Tuesday afternoons will continue to be sports afternoons, so please remember to send your child in appropriate shoes.

There has been a renewed focus on social skills and relationships in our classroom this week. Together, we have created a table outlining everyone’s rights and responsibilities in the classroom which align with the type of community we all agree we want to be a part of. We have discussed what it means to be a good citizen and we have have also practiced our active listening skills by playing a game of “Secret Whispers”. I have also allocated working partners for some activities as a way to facilitate the formation of new social connections, and we have had reflective conversations about the feeling that this evoked.

Wishing you all a restful weekend,
Jess xx

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Sarah’s Class week 4 Term 3

Posted on August 11, 2022 by sarahm

Hello everyone, hope this sees you all well.

It has been so wonderful this week spending time with individual children, reading through their stories and supporting them with the editing. I am witnessing much growth, development, and ability to write creatively. Some, have moved on to making their mini books which they will transfer their edited story into, along with drawings to go with the text. I am excited to see all books completed and hear them read and share their stories to the rest of the class. Hopefully, they’ll all be done by BOOK WEEK!

We also started making and constructing things with cardboard. As you will see from the photos there are some pretty amazing architectural designs being put together. Tinker, tailor, potter, tie dye and architect…. I popped into the craft room to see a diverse range of creative pursuits this week where there were half a dozen or so different activities on the go!

On Monday, we returned to Lane Cove Library where it was refreshing to see the majority all keen to borrow books. Some needed reminding of the walk back to school, and so, quickly returned some books back to the shelf. We are very lucky to have access to this community resource which supports children’s love of reading and books!

For our Maths we looked at the properties of 2D shapes and matched up a shape with its name and how many vertices and edges it has. Of course, exploring coding through Scratch was a HUGE hit especially given it was a new experience for the majority of the group. Observing how quickly they learn and try the many different variables of coding a sequence was a delight. We will spend another week ‘playing around’ and then I will set a specific task for them to complete, like a dance sequence, story, or game – something like that!

We worked on our ball skills in PE on Tuesday: Taking up the whole of the basketball court we divided into two groups, with one group practicing dribble skills and ability to throw a basketball into the hoop, while the other group played Pickleball. We then swapped over, so everyone had a turn. It was great to hear one child say at the end of the day – they learnt that Pickleball and ball play is not as hard as they had thought. Next week, we’ll be skipping for Jump Rope for Heart!

That’s us for another week folks. Have a nice weekend.

Love, Sarah

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Leesa’s Class Term 3 Week 4

Posted on August 11, 2022 by leesaj

Hi Everyone,

We have continued to take advantage of the sunny days and practiced our skipping, readying for next week’s Jump Rope for Heart afternoon. Some of the children have set goals to achieve while others are working on mastering new skills.

This week our sound was ‘ar, a’ as in “star” and “glass”. The children completed activities involving describing pictures using focus words, figuring out the antonyms for given words and revising the suffix ‘en’. The children also completed a spelling revision for sounds that we have already finished.

During Mathematics, the children explored tenths, hundredths, recording decimals on a number line, and how to use a calculator with the decimal point. The children also revised the “greater than” and “less than” symbols to complete decimal questions.

In Science we explored balanced and unbalanced forces through the program Generation Genius. The children watched a short video explaining balanced and unbalanced forces in everyday life activities. We learnt that forces have both strength and direction, unbalanced forces cause an object to change its motion and that gravity is always pulling objects toward the Earth. We then answered a series of questions to recap what we had learnt from the video.

A task set this week involved adding more descriptive language to simple sentences and how interesting the sentences then became. Reading groups occurred on Wednesday, with the children reading a text and answering literal, inferred, and evaluative questions. During these sessions we work on using the question in our answer, punctuation in our sentences, and drawing upon our prior knowledge of the topic.

Our session this week for Personal Development and Health was on writing down five trusted people we can go to about anything. This we called our support network. The children also wrote down the phone number for the Kids Helpline, and we discussed that this service was open 24/7 and that you can talk about anything to the counsellor on the call.

That is it for this week. Have a wonderful weekend!

Leesa x

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Wendy’s Group Week 4 Term 3

Posted on August 11, 2022 by wendyp

Hi everyone.

Lovely to see some sunshine this week even though it has been cold again! We enjoyed the weather on Tuesday afternoon when we went bushwalking for our PE session, leaving during lunchtime and making it all the way down to Gore Creek Reserve. It was still pretty muddy underfoot in places but not too bad and we collected quite a bit of rubbish from Lillypilly Falls on our way back.

Next Tuesday, our group will be running the school’s Jump Rope for Heart event during the afternoon. We’ll be demonstrating some skipping tricks and then setting up stations for everyone to practise skills and improve fitness. If you haven’t done so already, please sign your child up for the fund-raising part of this if they are interested. The website for parents is in the first part of this newsletter. At School Meeting last week, the children voted to set our goal at $8000 which was pretty optimistic! So far our skippers have raised over $1500! So it’s a good start!

This week we had a treat on Monday when Maya and Jana ran Chinese/Japanese morning! They told us about their traditional clothing, taught us some origami and then gave us rice and noodles, teaching everyone the right way to use chopsticks to eat it! It was a terrific way to begin our geography topic which is now in full swing. We’re looking at countries where members of our class have relatives living, finding these countries on a world map and colouring them. We are also constructing landscape paintings for our art projects over the next few weeks.

In Maths we have just finished learning about area, with Year 6s learning how to calculate the area of triangles and construct rectangles with the same area but different perimeters. We’ll be moving on to measuring volume and capacity next. Unit 17 in textbooks needs to be completed this week.

In English this week, we’ve looked at posters as texts, analysing the way the visuals and the language used can work together to enhance (or otherwise!) the intended message. Next week we will be going back to work on our picture books with Book Week coming up in a couple of weeks.

Thanks to everyone who has already had their parent interview. I hope to complete all the interviews in the next week or two, so please email me about times if you haven’t already.

Tomorrow night we have our Year 6/7 night, and I’m looking forward to seeing all our 2021 leavers and hearing about their experiences of high school so far. 6pm. Hope you can be there.

Have a great week!

Love,
Wendy

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School Meeting minutes Week 3 Term 3

Posted on August 10, 2022 by sarahm

Chaired by Hazel and Ethaniel (Sarah’s Class)

  • TBU by Sarah: A reminder that all school rules and agreements apply in after school care. There have been some children breaking rules, so please remember to respect resources and the adults who are there for you.
  • Fix-ims by Phoebe: A reminder to put the rubbish and packaging from these in the bin.
  • Lost Magical Builder by Josh S: Josh found two of these. If you lost any please see him.
  • 100 Days of learning by Ettie: Vinnie and Emma’s class are celebrating 100 days of learning today.
  • Jump Rope for Heart by Sophie: Sophie wanted a vote on whether we sign the school up to raise a certain amount of money. The school voted to work towards making $8000.
  • An Apology to the school: Two children apologised for waxing the inside of the silver slide and said they wouldn’t do it again.
  • Lost property by Meg: Please claim this.
  • Library Books by Leesa: Please return books to the return bin in the library.

End of school meeting preschoolers first.

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Preschool News Week 3 Term 3

Posted on August 4, 2022 by katrinaa

Hello everyone,

Seems COVID hit preschool hard last week. Preschool has remained operational through all the lockdowns and has never had a confirmed case until now, really we’ve been very fortunate, though also unfortunate to have all the permanent teachers impacted by COVID at the same time! Luckily everyone is on the road to recovery now!

Please remember, that if your child or any member of your household is COVID positive, you need to let us know, this is so we can mitigate the risk in preschool. We’re currently doing this by ensuring we promote outdoor play, making sure everyone either washes or hand sanitises their hands every 30 minutes, making sure we’re well ventilated and using our CO2 monitors and air purification system throughout the day. We can’t express how important it is to keep children at home if they are displaying even the mildest of symptoms. We know this can be difficult for parents if they are working, though bringing in an unwell child exposes everyone in preschool to the illness. A huge thank you to all families that have been doing this.

My sincere gratitude and heartfelt appreciation to Abi, Tui and Emma for holding the fort while Michael, Lisa, and myself have been in isolation. Without them preschool would have definitely had to close.  They have done an amazing job, as have the children, in really stepping up and looking after each other while we’ve been away.

The warmer weather and sun-filled days have led to lots of great outdoor play and the ability to add a bit of water to the mud kitchen again. We’ve also had the opportunity to set up some science experiments outdoors. Lisa worked with many of the children to finish our weaving project for Lane Cove Council. This will be displayed up at the plaza shortly.

On Thursday we celebrated Children’s Day for First Nation’s Children. We read Dreaming stories, watched a special episode of Play School called Yarning and Dreaming, and created some amazing hand prints using ochre paints.

Thank you to everyone that took part in maintenance day on Sunday. The school looks fantastic thanks to your efforts.

That’s it for this week!

Love

Abi, Tui, Michael, Lisa and Katrina

 

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Emma and Vinnie’s group Term 3 week 3

Posted on August 4, 2022 by Emma

Hi everyone,

we’ve had a lovely week continuing our parent/teacher interviews!

Quite a few families were sick this week, we wish you all a speedy recovery. We always miss our class members who aren’t at school.

It was lovely to go to the park on Tuesday afternoon and enjoy this lovely sunny weather we had for most of the week!

We’ve been working on different goals in reading groups, it’s so great to be able to do more focused work in a smaller group. In whole class reading, we’ve been focusing on making lots of predictions.

Our writing is coming along SO well! Some people are starting to challenge themselves to independently create a sentence, rather than writing our decodable sentence as a group. This week we wrote 2 factual sentences about the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the first dinosaur we’ve been learning about, and drawing, and labelling.

We’re very excited for our 100 days of learning party tomorrow (Friday)!

Just to clarify – home reading is completely optional, it’s not “homework” and we don’t want to cause any stress! It’s for students to be able to show you what we’ve been learning and how they are coming along with their reading. Please let us know if you are interested and we would be happy to put on a small Q and A session about how to help with reading at home.

Love, Emma and Vinnie

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