Finish off, Music, Classifying Triangles, Assembly

This morning we spent an hour systematically going through all the major tasks we have been working on this year and students wrote notes in their Skills Books as to what needs finishing before the last day of term next Thursday. The 3D Explanatory Posters and the Science Mould Reports are needed for moderation purposes across the schools in our cluster next Friday. 

Then, following Spelling Bingo, we moved onto a task which required students to classify a range of shapes into groups with the emphasis being on the mathematical reasoning behind their chosen way of grouping them. They could measure them, use protractors, scissors, write and make markings on them, in fact, anything they liked which would assist them with the task. Students were encouraged to use the Maths Dictionaries in the classroom, the internet and to have discussions with their friends. These will be collected at the end of tomorrow. A few of students (BS, VL, & PS &KF)  were working on their 3D Explanatory Posters or an assembly introduction so they didn't get quite as much time as the other students.

Music was on the cards after recess, followed by more time on the above maths tasks.

In the afternoon we did silent reading and then attended a whole school assembly which ran for the usual 45 minutes. The students who had finished their 3D Poster presented them in the assembly. Tonights focus for homework is definitely the Science report.

Books, books and poetry, Art, Triangles, Science Reports,

One third of the class away at cross country so we didn't start anything new. I also had three girls from Mrs Hayley's class as she went to the Huon and Channel Cross Country. Students had their usual Spelling Bingo, Art lesson and lots of time on their triangle work, their Science reports and their shape boards. The day was productive. I introduced some new books to the library and we looked at the work of Michael Rosen the poet.

Second term students will be doing a poetry unit so I am encouraging them to read as much poetry as possible. We have a wicker basket dedicated to poetry books in the withdrawal room.

EC- nearly ready to make a prinbt

A print

A string printing mat, NS

A print - NS

A string printing mat

Researching triangles - KK

Researching triangles - VL

Keep your eye out for the little books on the little shelf.

This week the shelf contains: The Little Book of Calm ( a personal favourite), Little Polar Bear,
 Little Captain, Piglets, The Littlest Book of Cats and Mice, A Teddy Bear's Little Instruction Book http://littlelibraryofrescuedbooks.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/teddy-bears-little-instruction-book-by.html

At the end of the day the grade 6 boys came in to say what a great day everyone had at the Huon and Channel despite the cold, wet weather and proudly showed us the shield the grade 6 boys had won. 

Dictionary usage, "ful" and "sce", triangles...

We started the day with Spelling Bingo, focusing on ful and sce words. Students have spelling tonight instead of the usual maths as they didn't do the spelling on Monday.  These words will be tested on Friday.

There were two spelling groups this week. 

We also talked again about how to locate words in a dictionary; this is a real skill and children need to be shown how to do it efficiently without wasting time by just randomly flipping. When you are young they are hard to use. The internet is also of course extremely quick and handy for checking spelling. We discussed the use of the two header words at the top as a quick way of checking what words appear on that page. We will focus on the pluses and minuses of spell checkers on computers soon. Ample time was given in class on the spelling contract.

Library was taken by Mrs Louis Sutton today and the students were very well behaved and enjoyed their session. 

After lunch we had silent reading a focused closely on triangles, looking at what is a triangle and how are they classified. Some students has quite a few misconceptions and hopefully we have ironed these out. They will continue with this task tomorrow looking really closely at equilateral, scalene, right angled and isosceles triangles.

I sat down individually with each of the grade six students and went through their last persuasive text they wrote and talked about their future goals. The tangrams they did with Mr Mac have been backed and are now in their portfolios. Our next focus will be on quadrilaterals. Students need to keep making their 3D shapes and get them glued onto their boards. Twelve students will be presenting their Explanatory postrs on their chosen 3D shapes in assembly this Thursday afternoon.

A couple of students have finished their soft toys and borrowed my camera to get a few shots outdoors to use in the advertisements they will be writing to promote their toys.

All photos students take go into the 5-6 Coote folder on the Photo Drive so students can access them to use in their reports, diaries, stories etc...

Good luck to those students running in the Huon and Channel Cross Country tomorrow.