Friday 23rd December, 2012

So little time, so much teaching to be done!

The children are having a fantastic time at swimming, but with specialist classes, it leaves us very little time in the classroom.  When we are in the room we have been trying hard to get through as much work as possible and to maximise our learning! 

Who, what, where, when?

In English, we have been looking more closely at questions.  The children have talked about the sorts of words we use to ask questions and we have had a go at writing out own questions using some of these words.  More importantly, we have learnt that you can't write a question without using a question mark.

Location, location, location

I am absolutely passionate about using picture books in all aspects of my teaching, but I particularly love using them in Maths.  There are so many wonderful books that deal with Mathematical concepts and our focus for this week, mapping and location language lends itself to using many great books.  Two of my favourite books for teaching these concepts are "Alexander's outing" by Pamela Allen and "The shopping basket" by John Burningham.  Naturally, we used both of these books this week!

After reading "Alexander's outing" the children had a go at making their own maps showing a route that Alexander took on his adventure.  They could arrange the landmarks in any order, but had to write a description of his route using direction words like through, over, around, along and past.  We have some wonderful artists in the class.

 

With "The shopping basket", we looked at a different aspect of mapping: co-ordinates.  After practising finding the location of things using grid co-ordinates, the children placed pictures of places and animals encountered by Steven in the story onto their own grids.  They then had to write the co-ordinates of each item.

 

 

Shiver me timbers!!!!

To tie in with our unit on water, we did a few pirate activities this week.  The first of these was creating our own pirate using a really fun template I found.  This is the link to it Draw a pirate
After spending heaps of time making their pirate, the children wrote descriptive words and phrases about their pirate.  They will use this for the basis of a descriptive text next week.

During our exploration of maps, we noticed that a lot of maps had compass roses on them.  This led to some online games and discussion about the different points of a compass.  To expand on this, we also created our own pirate maps using a template from the same site as our crazy pirates.  Pirate map

To finish the week we had a fantastic session using our Beebots and Probots to rotate through a range of different location activities.  Lots of fun and lots of real life application of the concept!

 

During the week you could...

Talk about what questions are and get your child to ask lots of questions about what they read in their take home books.
Get you child to write a description about a member of the family, or a place they have visited recently
Practise reading maps and finding locations using a street directory or Google maps on your phone or iPad
Try these location/mapping games
Bike route
Billy bug
Captain Slackbeard's Treasure Hunt



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Friday 16th November, 2012

We've had a short week this week, with the teachers working hard on getting their heads around the new National Curriculum for next year and visiting other schools on our Pupil Free Day. Despite this we've managed to fit in lots of great activities and done heaps of assessment tasks!

Money, money, money

The children have been extending their understanding of money in Maths this week to include counting and adding up sums of money.  We started with stamping coins and adding up what we had in our "piggy banks".  This activity gave the children the opportunity to put some of their abstract Maths skills into practise with a "real life" situation and they are starting to get a sense of how important being able to count in patterns such as 2s, 5s and 10s is, particularly when it comes to counting money.

On Wednesday, the children went "shopping".  I gave out a stack of supermarket catalogues, and the students pretended they had $10 to go shopping and buy what they wanted.  This meant the the children needed to add and subtract amounts of money in order to get the maximum bang for their buck.  They then cut out the items they wanted to buy and pasted them in their Maths books. Thankfully, the shopping was only pretend, or there would have been some very sugared up kids being sent home at the end of the day.  How many chocolates and lollies do you really need to buy????

Mrs Lawson and I continued to work with the Year 2 students to help prepare them for NAPLAN next year.  The focus of these sessions is to give the children skills with sitting tests (let's face it, you really have to learn how to do this) and to get them to read the Maths question very closely to ensure they answer correctly.  During this session, we did worded money problems and got the children to write an explanation of how they arrived at their answer.  The thinking and strategies some of the children were using were really very creative.

Silent "B"

Sometimes the English language is a pain, and teaching some of the rules in English can really do a teacher's head in.  Silent letters are a prime example. Here's a little clip I found that expresses my frustration with silent letters.

Often you have to tell your students that words are spelled a particular way, because they just are!

  Not a very satisfying answer for either teacher or student. I did a little investigating to find out why we have silent letters in English and basically it's because spoken English evolves at a faster pace than the written form.  Many of our words are also derived from other languages, so the spelling has been retained from these origins.  If you want to find out more click on this link. Why we have silent letters

The upshot for students is that they just need to learn some of the particular quirks with spelling words.  After all we don't want them LOLing and ROTFLing all the time when they write.

Hail Poetry!

This week for writing we looked at two forms of poetry; acrostic poems and shape poems.  We have some budding poets in our midst!  The children had a go at writing both and produced some wonderful work.  To get us started, we wrote class poems using this fantastic interactive writing site called "Read, write, think".  Here are the links to the interactive acrostic poem and shape poem (theme poem) activities if your child would like to practise some more.
Acrostic poems
Shape poems

As you can see, the children produced some very colourful, creative work.

Arshen's Whale Poems

Josie's Sea Star Poems

Sophie's poems about dolphins

Seth had a "Whale of a Time" with these poems

Phoebe's Turtle Poems - cute baby turtles!

Brilliant use of colour by Millie on her poems about turtles

Thomas's crusty crab poems

If you want a closer look at their finished poems, I have created a display on the board outside our room.

Proper nouns

We've also been looking at proper nouns this week and talking about why proper nouns have capital letters. The children had a great time illustrating common and proper nouns and sorting them.  When we were done I created a display of their work.

Well done to the students who drew Mr Sloane and Mrs Wood.  I think they really captured their likeness.

Swimming

Cute swimming reminder poster by Matilda

Don't forget, the swimming program starts on Monday.  We will be going in the last session and arriving back at school at about 3.15pm, so some days depending on traffic and parking in the car park there might be delays. The children have a good idea of what they need to bring each day.  Try to make sure everything is labelled, because inevitably we end up with piles of towels, goggles, socks and undies that no - one know who they belong to.  For some reason, it always seems to be boy's knickers that don't get claimed.  Go figure.  Get ready for two weeks of excited and exhausted children!

This week you should

Give you child a chance to count coins with any loose change you have.
Make sure you child gets plenty of sleep to prepare them for swimming!
Take care of yourself - this is my preferred method!

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1/2 Dinner and Sleepover

What a wonderful night we had!!!!  The children started arriving at around 5pm and after getting their sleeping bags and mattresses set up, we had some noisy games in the hall.

Dinner was a great success, despite a little BBQ malfunction.  Thanks so much to our parent helpers, without whom the children would surely have starved.  The award for most sausages eaten goes to Orion!  After dinner, we went outside for icy poles and some games with rubber chickens, hoops and balls.  The children seemed to get a real kick out of playing at school as it was getting darker.

Inside again, Mrs Pikia led a singing session and we bade farewell to our Year 1s.  The Year 2s got dressed in their PJ's, brushed their teeth, settled into their  beds and enjoyed "The Lion King".

Lights out, and to everyone's surprise a quiet night was had by all!

The children starting waking up at the very civilised hour of 6 o'clock and soon the smell of cooking pancakes started emanating from the canteen.  Thanks so much to Alison Sutherland for kindly doing a coffee run for the teachers.  Just what we needed.

Mrs Pikia hard at work making pancakes

Stirring things up!

Ready to feed the starving hordes!

Pancakes, anyone???

Breakfast, more games and more singing, then everyone was ready to head home, exhausted and happy.

All of the children had a great time, and should be congratulated for their fantastic behaviour.  Well done, guys!



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Friday 9th November, 2012

Knuckles, Knees and Gnomes

This week in English, we have been looking at words that begin with silent letters. The children brainstormed lots of words that have a silent first letter, like knight, knit, knee, knapsack and gnome. We will be doing more work on this concept in the coming weeks. Here are some websites you can go to for more practise.

Silent letter worksheets
Silent letter resources
Silent invaders
Silent letter games

Connectives and Conjunctions

We have also started exploring connectives and conjunctions in English this week. These are words that we use to join two or more short sentences together. The students had a great time making "silly sentences" and then joining two of these sentences together using connectives like so, then, when, and, but and until.

Turn Around Trains

As part of our focus on addition and subtraction this week we have been looking at "turn around" facts. This basically means that if you swap the numbers in an addition problem around, the answer remains the same. So, 5+6=11, and 6+5=11. Magic!!! To help the children practise this concept, we used unifix blocks to make "turn around trains". The children made their trains, drew them and wrote the equation, then turned them around.

Addition and Subtraction Word Problems

We also spent a lot of time this week doing worded addition and subtraction problems. Many of the children find doing addition and subtraction equations simple, but we found out that we need lots more practise with doing word problems. The focus for these lessons was getting students to read the question first, and ask themselves the question "What do I need to find out, to answer this problem correctly?". Sometimes, a question might appear to be an addition problem, but really, to get the answer you need to subtract! These sorts of "real life" maths problems are really important for developing the childrens' problem solving skills. And let's face it, they really are very useful in
everyday life too.

After practising solving some different word problems, by drawing the problem, the children had a go of writing their own problems. As you can see, the children did some fantastic work!

The Water Cycle

In integrated studies this week, we have been continuing to learn about water and why this resource is so precious. We have been learning about the water cycle, and the children are getting a good understanding of evaporation, condensation and precipitation. We are going to do some more science experiments next week to help us get a really good idea about this concept.

We are also learning a song about the water cycle. If your child wants to practise this at home, here it is.

At home you could.....

Keep practising addition and subtraction with these fun games.
Test the Toad
Number Pairs
Digit Workout

Work on your spelling using
Spell city
Spellits








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