Reading - Students set goals in reading by keeping track of how many books they read and then tried to read more. We are working on building stamina(being able to read for longer paeriods of time). Children wrote down how many books they thought they could read in 25 minutes and then tried to reach that goal. Children also read with their reading partners by taking turns. I started on reading assessments on Raz Kids and will continue on with these assessments over the next week.
Writing - students worked on the publish part of the writing process to produce a finished piece of writing. Children also foloowed this wrting process for writing their goals for learning which they will share with you at PTC's next Friday.
Spelling - words focused on the short u sound and the -ut and -un families. There were some great sentences in the home work this week.
This week we reviewed addition facts to 10 and completed a chapter test which everyone did well in. Students have learnt various ways to add and will now start to use this knowledge as they move onto a chapter on subtraction facts. We had fun making simple subtraction stories with small skits using the students in our class. For example: There are 7 students standing before you. 2 of them went to the toilet. How many are left? Students also worked in pairs to play a guessing game using counting on as a strategy for subtraction. Students started with a bag of cubes from which one of the partner took some cubes and then showed the remaining cubes. The partner then had to count on from the remaining cubes to the starting total to find out how many had been removed.
We started on a new unit this week, introducing the children to Engineers and the design process. Students talked about how architects are a kind of engineer that may be responsible to designing play grounds. Looking at pictures and designs of playgrounds children generated possible materials that they were made of. We also read a very fitting book brought in by Harlow called Rosie Revere, Engineer. Rosie overcomes a fear of failure to create a helicopter for her great Aunt by working through the design process of problem solving, planning, designing, testing, failing and redisign used by engineers. Children are very excited at the propect of creating their own things and brainstormed what we may learn or what they would like to learn in this unit - Techonolgy All Around Us. On Friday to give them a taste of this process children worked with a partner to first plan and then design and build a paper airplane which they thought could fly forward for a distance of 25 of Miss Larissa's feet. They will test their planes next week and then think about how they could redesign it to go further the next trial.
SOCIAL STUDIES
This week we talked about Fact vs Opinion and how to recognise each of these concepts with a fun group card sort. We also talked about the leaders of the countries we are from and tried to identify where they were from using country flags. Children noticed that some countries and their governments are lead by priministers and others by presidents They also noticed that leaders could be women or men.
The highlight of our week was our field trip to the local firestation where students learned a lot about how fiire fighters help the people in the community and keep us safe. Everyone was keen to 'drive' the fire trucks and have their questions answered by the fire fighters. When we returned to school students drew or wrote about something they had learnt or seen at the fire station.
Show and Tell will become part of our schedule to promote confidence and being able to speak up in front of others. Each presenter should use a loud clear voice and have thought about what they are going to present. The audience will be expected to be respectful listeners. Next week Group B will have their turn to present to their peers. I hope that Show and Tell will become a purposeful and beneficial part of our learning.
Larissa