French Update—Bonjour à tous!

This term in French:

  • Grade 6 students will continue learning grammatical features, mainly verbs/tenses. Students are progressing in reading comprehension skills, working towards writing passages of their own.
  • Grade 5 students are focusing on a play. Gestures and dialogue will inform much of the learning. They will then move on to do some games/sports and celebrations towards the end of the term.
  • Grade 3/4 students are beginning the term learning les vêtements (clothes), describing what they wear. We are building our descriptive vocabulary and this will tie in with Halloween dress ups and fun! We will be revising towards the end of the term, using a dramatic story to reinforce topics and themes covered this year.
  • Grade 1/2 students are working on creating their own bilingual text. This is helpful for revision and practise of the learning so far this year. We will also be using a dramatic story to exercise our French learning in a theatrical setting, using gestures and songs to support learning.
  • Foundation students are continuing to build up knowledge of basic interactive French in the classroom. We are preparing songs to share with the school community before the end of the year.

 

Merci!

~ Ursula Woods, French Teacher

PE Update—It’s All About Games

  • Term four will see Foundation and grade 1/2 students practising and developing sports-specific skills. They will begin to play more games to help develop an understanding of rules, team work and fair play. The junior school has done an incredible job of working in groups as part of their skill development and I am sure they will expand this out to work well together as a team when playing modified games.
  • Grade 3/4 students will be focussing on games and sports that require striking skills. Examples of striking skills games are tennis, cricket, softball, hockey and badminton. The 3/4 students will play various striking skills games and look at the connections between them. We have even had the table tennis tables set up as the weather has not been kind to us.
  • Grade 5 students will play lots of games this term with a focus on understanding of rules, tactics, strategies and continued skill development. Students will be exposed to some of the sports they will be able to pick as part of their interschool sports program next year.
  • Grade 6 students have a big term lined up starting off with independent games. This is a unit where each class has selected a game they would like to play over a four week period. Students are responsible for coordinating team practice as well as umpiring and setting up the games.
  • As a goodbye to the school, the grade six students will be placed in charge of developing an activity for the Foundation – Grade two students on their athletics day. Students will be given time in PE lessons to create and modify activities, which they will then be in charge of running, during the morning session of the sports day.

~ Geoff McShane, PE Teacher

Performing Arts

 Foundation Performing Arts

This Term we are continuing to use Bounce Back as a platform for our Performing Arts Program. We will be presenting our Core Values and Bounce Back acronym to our families, as well as singing “When You Are Smiling” from our “Looking on the Bright Side” unit.

 

The other units we will enjoy this term are:

  • Emotions
  • Humour
  • Relationships
  • Success

 

Keep on Bouncing Back!

 

Grades 1 – 6 Performing Arts

  • Grade 1/2 students have been excitedly preparing for their concert performance. Following the concert, we will focus on rhythm. Some activities will include body percussion, drum circles and playing percussion instruments. We will also investigate the 4/4 time signature, tempo and playing in time.
  • Year 3/4 students are off to a great start in Performing Arts, reinforcing our note and rhythm reading and time signature conducting patterns.
  • We practised reading treble clef notation by racing to the line or space on a super-sized stave drawn on the carpet with masking tape. Students then created a free-time composition by pretending to be notes and sitting and laying on the big staff (see photos attached). Later in the term we will study compositional devices such as motif and ostinati.
  • Year 5 students are beginning a unit on the blues and watched a mini documentary where we gained an understanding of the origins of the blues as well as the breadth and impact of the genre on contemporary music styles and its link to the civil rights movement in America. We played a 12 bar blues pattern on the ukulele and will study the blues on keyboards and other instruments.  We will improvise using the blues scale and compose a blues verse.
  • This term, Year 6 students are going to focus on preparing songs for their graduation. The students will play different instruments as an ensemble and will focus on musical elements such as pitch and dynamics. There will be an emphasis on creating original musical compositions for their performance.

 

~ Elise Winterflood, Clare Hopper & Marjie Tkatchenko, Performing Arts Teachers

 

PA-notes-15

Visual Arts

Our inspiration for making art this term involves fibres and fabrics, known as textiles.

 

We are interested to know:

  • What fibres and fabrics did the Aborigines use?
  • How did they manipulate them to create their artwork?

 

We will make our own artwork enlightened by our discoveries!

 

  • Foundation artists: pulling threads, collaging and decorating fabrics, weaving
  • Grade 1/2 artists: sewing and decorating dilly bags
  • Grade 3/4 artists: creating a Spirit Pole with a Dreamtime Story
  • Grade 5/6 artists: developing a Dreamtime Doll which embodies an animal or natural spirit

 

~ Marjie Tkatchenko, Visual Arts Teacher