WELCOME AND HAPPY TUESDAY, EVERYONE!
SHARED READING
Today we shared the hauntingly beautiful story of ‘Ride, Ricardo, Ride’ by Phil Cummings & Shane Devries.
Ricardo learns to ride on his father’s bicycle. Then war comes to his village, the bicycle is hidden, and Ricardo’s father also never returns. Finally, when the war is over, Ricardo rides again.
We then worked on 20 minutes of independent reading time, whilst teachers listened to individual readers. Well done 3HS for achieving your twenty minute target! And well done 3JH for nailing your 18 minute target (beaten by the recess bell, or I am sure we would have scored twenty too!).
WRITER’S WORKSHOP
Today we continued to explore how to read like a writer, noticing the ways authors use different styles, colours and sizes of fonts/text in their books. We looked at examples from both fiction and non-fiction. We then wrote for an amazing 25 minutes today, of which we were proud.
Lots of us are trying to incorporate different styles , sizes and types of lettering into our books. Mason managed 4 on one page. In Mason’s story, he visits Bondi beach where he finds a baby turtle, stranded and caught in the crack of some rocks. He rescues the turtle and takes him home, giving him the name Max. Only then does he discover that Max has magical powers:
Mason uses CAPITAL LETTERS to emphasis the word INVINCIBLE. He also, very cleverly, fades out the letters in the word INVISIBLE. He tried to make the letters in the word SMALL go smaller as he wrote them and the letters in the word FLOAT appear as if they are floating upwards. Fantastic learning, Mason – thanks for showing us some ideas that we’d not thought of as a group.
RELIGION
Our new topic is about Saints and the call to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. Prior to this we had studied the story of the Good Samaritan, and we agreed that we should try to be like the Samaritan, who cares for the stranger who is injured. We talked about how saints are people who have spent their lives being ‘Good Samaritans’. Today, we watched a video and discussed the life of Australia’s first and only saint, St Mary of the Cross Mackillop. We learned how she believed in an education for ALL children, including children who were too poor to attend school. We were amazed to learn that from humble beginnings, teaching her first class in a stable, Mary became the leader of some 175 sisters who taught in many schools in both New Zealand and Australia. Wow!
We also learned that there is a statue of Mary in Victoria Square. Jason said he goes to the church which the statue is in front of. Maybe next time you are in the city, you may have time to go and see the statue for yourself:
HEALTH: SELF REGULATION
After mindfulness we discussed self regulation in relation to being ‘ready to learn’. We placed various emotions into coloured zones:
Mrs Stam then challenged us to create an emoji for each of the zones. In the next lesson, we will be working out individual ways that we can de-escalate when we find we are in the yellow/red zones and ways of ‘lifting’ ourselves out of the blue zone.
