During the last two weeks, teachers have been provided with a day to plan learning programs for term four. During these planning days, staff analyse student data to identify their next stage of learning. Staff also reference the Victorian Curriculum requirements to ascertain the knowledge and skills that students are expected to have acquired.
During planning sessions, teachers discuss the following:
- What do our students need to know and why?
- How is this learning relevant to the lives in which our students live?
- What do we want our students to achieve by the end of this learning unit? How do we know if it has been successful?
- How can we connect curriculum areas; e.g. writing and reading
Below are the Writing and Maths focus areas that staff have planned for the start of next term:
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Writing
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Maths
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Prep
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Narratives
Key Genre Understandings:
- Narratives are a way of story-telling that engage the reader in an imaginative experience
- Narratives have a beginning that traditionally introduces the characters and setting, the middle involves a complication which the end resolves
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Number and Place Value
Key Mathematical Conceptual Understandings:
- Numbers represent value – two digit numbers are represented by groups of tens and ones
- There are patterns to the way numbers are formed
- There is a repeating pattern of 0-9 in the number system
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Year 1/2
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Persuasive Writing – Advertisement
Key Genre Understandings:
- Not all advertisements are used for persuasion, some are used to make something known, to inform the public or to draw the audience’s attention to something.
- Advertisements are written to put forward a point of view, persuade the audience to act in a certain way or adopt a particular behaviour.
- Writers of advertisements use fact and opinion to convince a reader.
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Addition and subtraction
Key Mathematical Conceptual Understandings:
Addition and subtraction are related to each other, they are inverse operations.
There are lots of different, efficient and accurate ways to solve addition and subtraction problems.
Place value knowledge can be applied to solve addition and subtraction problems. |
Year 3/4
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Science Fiction Writing
Key Genre Understandings:
- Science Fiction is an imagined story that features characters and events that could not exist in the real world.
- It involves technology or scientific advances and takes place in a future that may or may not seem possible.
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Fractions, decimals
Key Mathematical Conceptual Understandings:
- Fractions and decimals enable you to understand the parts of a whole
- Fractions and decimals have a relationship that work with the parts of a whole
- The ordinal number associated with the number of equal parts names the part e.g. 6 parts – sixths
- Decimal fractions extend the base 10 system of numeration on the basis that ‘1 tenth of these is one of those’
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Year 5
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Historical Narrative
Key Genre Understandings:
- A fiction text that takes place in a realistically (often factually) portrayed setting of a period of time.
- An imagined story set in the real world.
- Historical fiction focuses on the problems and issues in a particular time period – ie gold rush
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Fractions
Key Mathematical Conceptual Understandings:
- The size of the fraction is determined by the size of the whole
- When two fractions are equivalent there are two or more ways to represent the value
- Part-whole relationship goes well beyond shading a region (eg part of a group, part of a length)
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Year 6
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Memoir
Key Genre Understandings:
- It focuses and reflects on the relationship between the writer and a particular person, place, animal, or object.
- It leaves the reader with one impression of the subject of the memoir
- It is limited to a particular phase, time period, place, or recurring behaviour in order to develop the focus fully
- It makes the subject of the memoir come alive
- It maintains a first person point of view.
- It has meaning; shows what the author learned from the experience
- It Focuses on one event; about one point in the author’s life
- It is about the author’s experience more than about the event itself
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The Four Processes
Key Mathematical Conceptual Understandings:
- Addition can be generally represented as the sum of two known parts where the order does not matter
- Subtraction can be represented as the difference between the whole one and its parts
- Multiplicative thinking is moving from a count of equal groups to the for each and times as many ideas for multiplication
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Chess
This week we had our final lunchtime chess session of the year. 52 students from Foundation – Year 6 took part in the program, learning different skills and strategies of the game.
During our final session, medals were given to the top three students in Prep – Year 1, and Year 2 – Year 6. A scoring system was used throughout the term, resulting in the top three places.
Prep – Year 1
- 1st Victor Wang
- 2nd Lewis Ridley
- 3rd Leopold Crawshaw
Year 2 – 6
- 1st Sam Heaton
- 2nd Alex Crawford
- 3rd Terrence Wang
During the final session, one of the coaches played a blindfolded game against three students. He was able to memorise the moves that he and his opponents made, and went on to win the game!
Congratulations to everyone involved in these sessions. We look forward to running this again in 2017.
