The Persuasive Text and Maths

A busy day, home at last after a long staff meeting. Mr Matt Stafford and myself will be co-ordinating the school student council and hope to have our first meeting next week.

Today, in the classroom, students wrote up their persuasive texts about the use of animals in warfare. They were given 50 minutes to plan, write and check their finished copy. I have collected them and they will receive an assessment which I will share with parents at the upcoming parent/teacher discussions along with other assessments and the social progress of the students. Most students were given their interview times today but other with a number of siblings will receive their times tomorrow. I am still short  9 responses from parents; hopefully they will come in tomorrow as these discussions will be very informative and productive.  Below is the criteria the students are being assessed on for the persuasive writing they did today:

Comments will be made on all of the above. Hopefully we will do another text about the pros and cons of mobile phone ownership in a few weeks. 

Following this we learnt how to play two place value games to increase students knowledge in this area and to help them further understand the concept of regrouping. These games are located in the back of their large scrapbooks. It might be interesting to ask your child about these games. Some of the music option students (woodwind) didn't get to play the Race to 1000 game as they always go for their lesson at 12-00.

In the afternoon we had silent reading and a number of students went to guitar and choir and grade 5 woodwind. The remainder either went to a rugby clinic which was held on the oval for upper primary students or published some of their written drafts, or stayed and caught up on some work because they were behind. We now have five operating computers in the room and are expecting one more in the near future.

The new withdrawal (ex-Science) room is starting to come together and at recess I managed to recover the display board, and move some furniture around. Some of the grade six boys assisted me in placing some shelving in the room  and cleaning stickers and mess of the walls, thanks guys! There will be two computers in this area and an animations area where students can make and photograph their creations soon. Science will have to be a major focus next week where we will be looking at mould and the conditions it needs to grow.

Tomorrow morning their will be an ANZAC Day display in there. Students will be looking at a range of picture books which focus on primarily Gallipoli, and the wars in which Australia has been involved. In pairs students will be designing and promoting their chosen picture book to create a persuasive poster, which will cover some of the components of the visual literacy aspect  of the Australian Nation Curriculum.

Half of the of the class has now read the novel Storm Boy. Keep the four books circulating please. 

Writing Persuasive Text, The Lorax continued...

First up today I read students Krista Bell's book Lofty's Mission as a way of introducing the ways in which animals were use or abused in warfare. The book is fiction, but in Australia between 1942 and 1943, during the Second World War, home breeders like Charlie Morris donated more than 13, 000 baby pigeons "squeakers" to the army to be trained as messenger pigeons. Several Australian birds won the Dickin medal for bravery. We also looked at some non-fiction accounts and examples of the ways in which animals were employed during the major wars Australia has been involved in. Students will be writing a persuasive text either in favour or against the use of animals in warfare tomorrow. Today they were also provided with a structure to assist them.  This ties in with all the work we have done on emotive texts and use of rhetorical questions over the last three weeks.

Structure:
Introduction
– include a statement to give the author’s opinion
– preview important arguments
– engage the reader’s attention
Body
– include a series of paragraphs
– give a new idea or argument with reasons and examples to support it in each paragraph
– use persuasive language
– use quoted or reported speech
– use cohesive language to link ideas between paragraphs
Conclusion
– restate the position of the writer
– sum up the main arguments
– include request action to be taken by the reader (optional)
– do NOT give any new information


We then view a short film clip from Behind the News on sniffer dogs used to detect bombs.   We revisited the idea of using keywords to take notes.

http://www.abc.net.au/btn/story/s2214523.htm

After lunch we read some factual accounts of animals being used  in warfare in terms of transport haulage, communications, morale boosters, and as live weapons. We also spent a fair bit of time looking at how to do a good search on a topic and to question sources without adequate citation or from trustworthy websites. Tonight students have been requested to do some further reading on animals in warfare and to explore their arguments ready to write their persuasive text in a 50 minute time frame first up tomorrow morning..

The Lorax was also back on the agenda and a generous amount of time and guidance given to look at the similarities and differences between the original version of The Lorax and the Hollywood adaption. Students will be expected to continue working on this tomorrow night as part of their literacy homework. 

We watched the trailer again to refresh their memories and looked at IMDb the Internet Movie Database.

Maths will be a major focus tomorrow.

First Buddy Assembly and more...

Today was a resonably productive day. We are now up the chapter 21 of The Pinballs. If students have missed any chapters they can borrow the book to take home.

Shuffling large cards is not easy!

Playing the place value game

Place Value Game

We had our second lesson on place value and looked at numbers up to a million. At the end of the written activity students played the game called Make the Number.

Following their weekly 45 minute music lesson, students read about Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and watched a clip about his life. Their homework tonight is to write up a recount. See the blog under this one for further details and the short film. Students have been taught how to use keywords when note-taking, rather than trying to write down cumbersome sentences when watching a visual text. Students can later create sentences from these keywords.

In the afternoon we had our first buddy assembly and the two grade six students who ran it did a superb job. Congratulations also to those five students in the class who received certificates. If students would like a copy of the Count on Me PhotoStory, which tracks the activities for the past two weeks, they need to bring a memory stick and it can be loaded on, along with the first PhotoStory made a week ago entitled Super Happy Fun Times.

At lunch time I worked with three boys to show them how to construct simple boxes. We will be making these in class to house our microorganism jigsaw puzzles we will be making next week.

Some boys learning the art of box making

Boxes which will house microorganism puzzles