We started Monday morning with our second round of swimming. It's been an exciting way to start the week and many students are looking forward to the Swim Gala in a few weeks. 

We finished up multiplication this week, exploring word/story problems and distinguishing between addition and multiplication questions. Students also had the opportunity to write their own, and on Friday, solved each other's problems. We'll be moving into division and fractions in the next few weeks, followed by time. 

During Daily 5, we had some mini-lessons where we began to explore the form of poetry - What is it like? Students read and explored different poems, noting things about punctuation, organisation and word choice. We spent a day exploring some aspects of word choice, including repetition, rhyming words, sound words and adjectives. More time was needed with adjectives, in order to develop a better understanding, and this carried us to the end of the week. Students had fun writing their own poems, and next week we will begin to look at the difference between stories and poems. Students will be receiving new words next week.

We started our new and final unit, Sharing the Planet. Exploring our central idea brought about some interesting ideas and questions, and we starting thinking about the difference between living and non-living things. We thought about what these different things need, have and could be. Next week, we will explore our school grounds, looking for living things and their habitats.

Have a relaxing long weekend, as there is no school on Monday! 

This was the first week of swimming, and everyone had a great time splashing, jumping in and practicing different strokes. Just a reminder that regular PE will not be happening on Wednesdays anymore, as both times have been combined to allow for a longer swimming PE session. 

In math, we have continued exploring the connection between arrays, repeated addition and multiplication. Some fun games were played throughout the week to help students develop a better understanding of multiplication. We will continue multiplication next week as we look at story problems and when we would apply this in the real world. We will also begin to explore division, fractions and telling time before the end of the school year. 

In writing, students gave each other feedback in order to revise and edit their explanation writing. They practiced writing explanations using artefacts during Student Led Conferences as well. They also finished completing their field trip reflection from last week in their online portfolio and some added photos. We will begin to explore poetry and then persuasive writing as we get further into our next unit of inquiry. 

Our unit, Where we are in place and time, has come to an end this week. Students completed summative assessments where they viewed artefacts from Pompeii and wrote about what these artefacts tell us about their civilisation. They also chose an object (toys, books, pencil, water bottle, etc) and wrote about what it would tell archaeologists about them if it was excavated. We will jump into our new unit, Sharing the planet, next week. 

Next week is a normal week, with five days of school. Swimming is Monday and home learning is updated for the next two weeks. However, word sorts will be the same for the following week.