Welcome back and it has been so good to meet with many parents for our 3 Way Conferences. If you haven’t been able to meet with me this week, please reach out via email or Seesaw and we can arrange a time to meet which is convenient for all of us.
This week in maths, we have begun recognising shapes which have specified attributes, such as a given number of angles or a given number of equal faces and to identify and name 2D and 3D shapes. Please see the family maths letter below for more information and how you can support your child at home.
You can continue supporting your child in adding fluently to 20 using mental maths and practise mental addition which out shopping, cooking or measuring lengths or widths.
In literacy, we have worked on writing numbers correctly in handwriting, made new words using vowels and consonants, practised the short vowel sounds and have begun writing poetry. Currently, students are finishing up their final draft of their Bio poem (a poem about themselves) and have started the first draft of a colour poem.
In reading, we have reviewed the strategy of how and where we read in our learning space and learned about choosing a good fit book. Please see the letter below if you would like to know more about this strategy. In our guided reading groups, we have completed work, sentence and text work focusing on specific concepts and skills for each particular group.
In our UOI, we have reviewed the definition of well-being, done a jigsaw of sharing the definitions and drawing of vocabulary words linked to this unit. We have focused on the learner profiles and approaches to learning for this unit and tried to think when we’ve exhibited these qualities or practised these approaches.
Next weeks’ learning engagements will be:
Literacy: handwriting practise, making words using vowels and consonants, putting our phonics understanding to spelling and writing. We will continue exploring what poetry is and how it can sound, including reciting some poems. The students will write poems connected to their well-being while thinking about how community spaces can support our well-being. Reading strategies covered will be iPick good fit books and how books can be too easy, just right and too hard. We want our students to be reading ‘just right’ books most of the time with some ‘too easy or ‘too hards’ thrown in once-in-awhile.
For maths, we will explore 2D shapes: names, corners, sides, angles, whether they can tesselate and if we can make pictures using shapes that have symmetry. We will look for 2D shapes in natures and in the things around us. Please see the family letter below which describes our learning objectives for this unit of work.
Our current UOI will finish in two weeks time so next week we will begin the summative assessment. Students will be presented with the summative assessment rubric and be organised into small groups to begin creating a community space according to set criteria.
Please check that you child has a working, pluggable set of headphones they can use at school. Some students brought their headphones home over the holiday and they now need to be brought back to school for use with our spelling, reading and phonics programmes. Thank you for your support in this matter.
Reading strategy: parent_pipeline_f_read_appropriate_level_texts_that_are_a_good_fit
See photos here.