A very late “Welcome to 2015”.

It is a very late welcome to 2015 for this years first blog post.  We have been flat out in Room 13 getting to know a whole new bunch of Year 6s.  We no longer have Year 7s at our school, as they have made the move to secondary school throughout our state.  This has posed some changes to the way we do things in Room 13, however we are all set in our routines now.

This year I will be teaching English to all Year 6 students, and my teaching partner in Room 12 will be teaching Mathematics.  We thought that this would be a great way to prepare our students for the move to secondary school in Year 7.  So far things are going great, and I am loving this change in my teaching.  We are also busy using Visible Learning strategies in the school with lots of work on developing Learning Qualities and a common language about learning for our students.  Next term the VLT (Visible Learning Team) and myself will be presenting at the Shared School Development Day for our network at the high school.  We are excited to be sharing the journey we have taken in Visible Learning for the past three years with other schools in our region.

So far this year in English we have worked hard learning about persuasive text, parts of speech, show me don’t tell me and Mentor Sentences.  We have read novels for our Literature Circle groups and have used hooks to engage our audience.  The students have used STAR Books as a study guide, reflected about their learning in their ACLs (Assessment Capable Learning Logs) and discovered the terms Super 6 and VOICES.  Some of the students attended the Young Writers Conference with author James Roy whilst the whole class participated in the Literature Centre’s incursion.  During this incursion we looked at the story ‘The Boy with a Toy’ by Sonya Hartnett, and deconstructed the illustrations to predict the story line.  We have almost finished creating our own toy inventions, and when we do I will put some on the blog to share.  Our student leaders attended the GRIP Leadership conference where they came away with some other great ideas for our school.  Students from Room 13 have created brochures about natural disasters for science and have learnt the 5 themes of Geography for Society & Environment.  We have created some beautiful art pieces that include our goals hands, warm and cool colour paintings and crazy hair pictures for our art folios.

Next term Room 12 and 13 will have student teachers for the term.  I always look forward to these visits because I learn so much for the younger generation of teachers coming through.  We also have our camp in Week 2 which will be exciting.  The Year 6s will participate in a number of activities that help to build team work, confidence, leadership and resilience.  I always look forward to the superb food that is dished up to us three times a day.  The first week back we will be working through a number of tasks linked to ANZAC day to honour the 100 Year Anniversary of Gallipoli.  I hope to share some work students do for this topic.

Mrs B

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