Tuesday (Term 4 | Week 1) | R/1JH and R/1MP

Welcome back to Term 4!

Today we welcomed Kayden to our school. He joins us in R1JH as a Reception student. Thank you to Sam, Williams and Joshua for being such welcoming buddies on Kayden’s first day at school.

: Kayden drew a marvellous lion today and recorded it had 4 feet

Congratulations to a very proud Isabella who won the Book Week Competition for the R/1 category. Her poster is displayed around school – see ion you can spot it. It’s in several different places!

: Isabella in the library with her poster (the colourful one to the top right of the picture)

During the holidays, Arnav turned 6 years old and Ambrose returns to school today on his 6th birthday. We sang Happy Birthday to both boys and wished them well. Arnav told us all about his special day which involved playing laser-tag with his friends.

Here’s our class calendar for the month of October:

And our wonderful helpers were:

And here’s today’s learning timetable:

SHARED READING

Our literacy focus for the next four weeks centres on information texts.. Today we began by sharing a text called Surprising Sharks by author, Nicole Davies and illustrator, James Croft.

When we activated our prior knowledge of sharks, it was amazing to see just how much we collectively knew about these predatory fish … although we also discovered some new – and some very surprising! – facts when we shared the text.

LITERACY ACTIVITY

Today’s focus was on the use of diagrams in non-fiction texts.

In the text, we focused on two interesting diagrams of a shark’s exterior and interior. We discussed why the author had used a simplified drawing to show the appearance of the shark rather than just writing sentences of text.

We then set about creating simple labelled diagrams of a human body. Some children worked individually to record their knowledge whilst others worked in pairs or small groups on the task. Everyone was focused on the same objective: to make a diagram that showed parts of the human body that was clear and easy for the reader to understand.

A reminder was given that careful thought needed to go into deciding what should be labelled and where each label should go.

NUMERACY
Strand: Number and Algebra

Today’s numeracy lesson began with a lovely story book, One is a Snail by Jeff Sayre. You can watch and listen to a child reading the story here:

Group 1 students were invited to choose 2 animals from the class collection. Just as in the book, they were encouraged to draw, add and record the number of feet. They continued this activity by selecting two different animals for drawing and recording each time.

Group 2 students were invited to choose a variety of animals, as in the book One is a Snail. They also recorded and added the number of feet. Students were encouraged to skip count/multiply once confident with the concept of repeated addition.