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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