From the Classroom

What’s been happening in our classrooms?

Foundation A & B

Finding out facts in Foundation

100 days of Foundation

We celebrated 100 days of fun, laughter, learning and adventure and had the BEST day for the biggest event on the Foundation calendar! We got to cook, dance, draw, eat and spend time with our special friends. We are so incredibly proud of all you have achieved in your 100 days and cannot wait to follow you in your future adventures.

Little pig, little pig let me come in!

Foundation B blew away Clyde Grammar with their Three Little Pigs Assembly. The big bad wolves and little pigs put on their best singing voices and divine dance moves to showcase a spectacular act. Our Foundation students were super brave and we were so impressed by your performance.

Let me tell you a story…

In literacy this term, Foundation A are working on our skills in recognising the important parts of what makes a good story. Every story needs a setting, characters and an event and we have been using our imagination to think about how our stories might start, what will happen and how they will end. We have so many wild and wonderful ideas — Foundation A are certainly going to be a great bunch of storytellers.

We live on Boonwarrung country

We have been exploring the concept of country and different Dreamtime stories. We loved learning about the story of the eagle, Bunjil the Creator. We then harnessed our creativity to produce our own Bunjil. We used warm, earthy colors and colours from the Aboriginal flag and collected objects from country to place on our artwork.

Foundation A enjoyed the story of the Rainbow Serpent, Goorialla, and how he created the features of our beautiful Australian landscape. We created our own colourful rainbow serpent using paint and collage materials, and depicted him slithering across the Australian plains that we created using inspiration from traditional dot art painting methods.

Awesome addition

Foundation B have been LOVING exploring addition through our addition machines. We work in partners and place our objects in the machine holes. Then TAAA DAAA — we open the machine and place the objects in the tens frame and calculate our total. It’s so much fun!

3D Shapes are everywhere

Foundation A are exploring 3D shapes in our world. Cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders and rectangular prisms are all around us and we can even build with them. We went on a shape hunt to see how many 3D shapes we could find at Clyde Grammar and we also caught hundreds of spherical bubbles!

Year 1A

Grade 1A turn back the clock and discover the past

As part of our Humanities Unit, Grade 1 have been learning about the past and the present and how things change over time. We were lucky enough to travel to Coal Creek to experience what life was like over 100 years ago. The students had a wonderful time exploring the old town. We visited an old school and sat in the classroom and experienced what it was like to write with an ink well and draw on a slate board. We also spent some time looking through old houses and huts and an old-fashioned doctor’s surgery and chemist. We learnt about the types of transport back in those days and the children had a chance to see an old steam train and to walk through the carriages. It was great to see how much fun the students had while learning about the importance of our past.

Year 1B

Understanding more about multiplication

1B have been learning about multiplication and arrays. We learnt that arrays are made up of rows and columns and then we looked around our room and used what we found within our classroom to make our own arrays. There was a lot of mess to clean up at the end of our activity!

Year 2A & B

It’s fun to be in Year 2

Year 2 students have been exploring animals from different countries this term. We have been learning about their habitat, diet, life cycle and how they behave when predators are around. In class, we created our own habitat using collage and tearing up small pieces of paper to create layers. We also selected an animal to write about and to create using recyclable materials.

In 2B, the students began exploring how to give back to others by reading the story Have you filled a bucket today? In class, we then learned that a bucket-filler is a kind, caring and genuine person who wants to make others feel good about themselves.

Throughout Term 2, we have celebrated many events. We started the term with Pyjama Day to support foster children and Clyde Grammar students raised $372.55 for this worthy cause. We also celebrated NAIDOC Week and were visited by Auntie Sonia, an Indigenous elder who shared stories about the land where our school is built. We also learnt a special Indigenous dance. In the past week, we were all very excited to have a visit from our Year 1 teacher, Mrs Ireland, and her new baby, too. The students were super excited to finally meet her little bundle of joy, Leo.

Focus on Maths

This term we have been learning multiplication and division skills and we’ve been using building blocks to unlock some cool math secrets! Our Grade 2 students have been arranging unifix blocks, counters and even themselves into rows or columns to create arrays.

Students connected repeated addition to multiplication by adding the same amount of blocks each time to create additional rows or columns.

When learning simple division strategies we enjoyed number stories, such as how to share 12 apples between a growing family, and using unifix blocks to compare the number of times a smaller number fits into a larger one.

Animal encounters incursion:

In Week 4 we were lucky enough to have Aussie Animal Encounters visit us with a few friends! We met some snakes, a blue tongue lizard, a sugar glider possum, a baby crocodile and even a beautiful black cockatoo!

We each had a chance to hold the animals and some were easier to hold than others!

Pen pal letters

In 2A we became pen pals with Mount Waverly Primary School Grade 2 students. We wrote our first letter in Week 2 and were very excited to receive our first letters back last week! We have enjoyed learning about our different schools and our pen pals’ favourite things! We are looking forward to writing more letters and sending some drawings to our new friends, too.

Year 3A & B

From the solar system to wild art

Creating planets

This term we are learning about Earth and the sun and the moon. We have been busy making paper mâché planets and moons and painted them as accurately as we could. It was very messy but lots of fun!

“I really enjoyed the paper mâché because it was fun doing some different type of art,” Vihanya.

“I loved the mess of the glue and paper when making paper mâché, I also really liked mixing the colours for the painting,” Jasmine.

Meeting a real author

On Thursday the Year 3 children walked to Smiths Lane Hub where they met author Naomi Irvin who wrote Three Thousand Eight Hundred and One Trees. Naomi shared the background of the story and read it to the children. They asked lots of interesting questions and Naomi even signed her book.

“It was really nice meeting the author,” Avjot.

“It was a great opportunity to meet an author in real life,” Louie.

Wild @ Art competition

3B completed a special art project organised by the Australian Conservation Foundation called Wild at Art. They researched threatened species, chose one animal to draw and used oil pastels, paint or pencil to finish their work.

“I enjoyed researching a threatened Australian species and using my creative skills to draw it. I drew the Diamond Firetail bird,” Louie.

“I really enjoyed doing the art and learning more facts about the flower I chose, the Rice flower, which is a threatened Australian flower. I used oil pastels to create my work,” Sidhak.