Check out the link to a great book review site on our ‘Literacy’ page, to help you find the perfect book for winter holiday reading.

Well, we have passed the half way mark of term and winter has hit with a bang. We had a fantastic time at camp though many have came back and needed some time off with colds and viruses!

We are busy learning about energy and our current reliance on fossil fuels. We have learned about the impacts of this reliance and are beginning to investigate some of the alternative, more sustainable sources of energy production.

In Religion we have been focussing on ‘Prayer’ and each student has planned and lead a class prayer session based on a theme. These have been reflective and reverent and often quite creative. We spent some time analysing the Our Father and we have come up with our own version which can be seen on the RE page. It is The Lord’s Prayer in our words.

In writing we have been looking at the structure and features of persuasive texts and have created a piece about the benefits of Genius Hour and why it should be a part of every classroom. There have been some really good arguements and supporting details given.

We are also continuing to read our class novel “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan. This is a very engaging story about an 11 year old boy in America who finds out that he is not quite who he thought he was. We are learning about Greek mythology as we read and really enjoying the book.

More updates soon. Back to lots of learning 🙂

It’s hard to believe we are about to embark on the second term of the school year. The weather has started to cool and it feels like we have left the Summer far behind us.

This term will be a very busy one with School Sports day in week one and several sporting events coming up over the next month or so. We will also begin to start thinking about CAMP which is about 6 weeks away! As you can see, there are lots of exciting things to look forward to.

Don’t forget to check out our Math page for some cool activities to practise what we are doing in class. Our focus in the first part of the term will be using addition and subtraction to solve problems  using lots of different strategies. There are also several website links to help you to practise your timestables. There is a great app called “10 minutes a day Times Tables” by DK which is great for competitive practice.

I am going to post a mystery pic to see what discussion it can start. Feel free to comment with your ideas of what it might be and why I may have posted it.

We were very lucky this week to have a visit from Andrew Chinn, a very talented musician and songwriter who helps others to praise God through music. Andrew sang with some of our choir members at mass on Thursday and then worked with each of our units in a workshop which was so engaging and fun that we didn’t want to leave!

At the end of the day, we all came together for a mini concert to share the music together. It was a wonderful day and we felt very blessed to have the opportunity to meet with Andrew (who found our children very open and receptive). He wrote about the day on his blog which you can read about here.

Welcome to the new school year. It’s always exciting to start out fresh with a new class and wonder where our learning journey will take us. Term one of 2016 is going to be a short one and is sure to be jam packed full of events and fun learning.

I did lots of reading over the holidays and especially enjoyed sitting out in my back garden soaking up a little sun(with plenty of sunscreen on of course!) and soaking in some great stories. Did anyone else read a good book over the holidays? If you did, share about it in the comments below. If you haven’t read a good book lately, share with us what the last great book you read was. It’s always nice to hear about good books. If you know that the book is in the school Library or is Lexiled, include that information.

Remember that good digital citizens don’t share their personal information on the internet  so use your first name only.

In America at the moment they are preparing for a special time of year they call ‘Thanksgiving’. I thought it was a good opportunity to share with you this great little video from Kid President.

I am thankful for the opportunity to spend each day with great kids !

I challenge you to make your own video (or get together with a few friends) of the things you are thankful for. You might also want to post some of your ideas below in the comments section.

Chemistry

We are learning about ‘Matter’ (which makes up everything) at the moment and finding out how it is classified.

We have discovered that most matter can be classified (sorted) into three categories; Solids, Liquids and Gases.

Here are some weblinks to give you more information

Solids: Chem4kids

Liquids: Chem4kids

Gases: Chem4kids

Plasma info: Chem4kids

This great website called Wonderopolis, has lots of information to help you investigate and find out about the world around you. They have a new ‘wonder’ each day.

As part of our study of the history of Australia, we have spent time exploring the culture of the first Australians. The aboriginal people were custodians of this land for tens of thousands of years before Europeans first set foot here and they have a rich culture and spiritual connection to the land. We have listened to some of the ‘dream time’ stories and looked at the way they tell stories through art. This ‘story telling’, culminated in our class creating our own ‘aboriginal inspired’ artworks this week. The results are amazing and you can see some of the process on our Inquiry page.

100th anniversary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli.

This week our students explored stories of Australian and allied troops during WW1. We watched some amazing videos from the 60 minutes special ‘Lost Stories’ and each student created a Gallipoli booklet by researching and analysing historical texts. We also read the well known poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae and the heartfelt response written by fellow Canadian Moina Michael, “We shall Keep Faith”. These poems gave us some background about the poppy as a symbol of remembrance of our fallen soldiers.

I invite students to share below in the comments, what they discovered and how our learning about the ANZACs impacted them.

Handmade poppies at the National Gallery in Melbourne.

With the first term well under way, it’s time for an update on what’s been happening in 5/6 JSPM. We have been busy getting to know each other and setting up a great learning environment where everyone is valued and respected and where learning is fun. The students have discovered that I love ‘foldables’ and use them all the time. We used some foldables to record our expectations of each other as a learning community. This resource was created by another clever teacher (I get lots of great ideas from other teachers online) and adapted for our classroom.

In Maths we have been exploring place value and large numbers as well as brushing up on our multiplication facts. Our goal is to build accuracy and fluency for all our facts from one to twelve. Some students are even challenging themselves to learn their 13 to 15 times tables!

We have been using games and ‘hands on’ activities in our learning and in the pictures below you can see us playing ‘Place Value Partners’, a battle ship type game by Laura Candler and ‘wipe out’, a calculator game which uses place value understanding to help ‘wipe out’ a digit from a large number by subtracting it’s value. Try playing this with your children at home, they would love to teach you 🙂

Wipe Out

Place Value Partners

In Literacy we have been looking at various strategies to help us gain understanding from what we read and view. We are ‘stopping and thinking’ as we read as well as asking questions and clarifying things we are not sure about. In collaborative groups we are using a technique called ‘reciprocal reading’ to practise these techniques and also develop our interpersonal learning skills. There is always great discussion and learning that goes on in these groups.

Our integrated unit this term is all about our Solar System and Earth’s place within it. Through this unit, we are learning about the process of researching and investigating a given topic and organising the information we gather, in order to develop a report to share our knowledge. Students are working in pairs to find out about one of the bodies in our solar system and they will then write up and present these findings. This is a very valuable, teacher supported project which will hopefully enable them to approach other, more extensive projects, confidently later in the year.

At assembly last week, we presented to the whole school some of the learning from our Religion unit ‘Love is…’. This unit explored Jesus’ teachings of love and how we can be signs of God’s love through our daily actions. The students developed role plays to demonstrate ‘God Moments’ and did a wonderful job of challenging their audience to live these at home and at school.

It has been a great start to the year and I am very excited about the wonderful group of learners that we have in our class.

Students, what do you think has been the best thing about the start of the year? Visitors, do you have any comments about our learning?