Edith's Homegroup
2009 Term 4
16 November 2009
This term we’ve undertaken a quick, whole class project on lizards. Towards the end of last term the children were finding many newly hatched baby skinks around the school so we used this as a springboard to learn more about skinks and other lizards – particularly Australian, but some other interesting facts were also discovered. After brainstorming questions, we chose one each to find the answer to – some have proved quite tricky!
Why do blue tongues have blue tongues?
Why do Blue Tongues stick their tongues out?
How long do Blue Tongue lizards’ tails grow?
How many species of lizards are there in Australia?
How do chameleons change colour?
How long do they live?
How do lizards live in the wild?
Details of their environment.
What do lizards eat?
How do thorny devils live in the desert?
How do skinks drop their tails?
How do skinks grow back their tails?
How long does it take?
We also shared ourselves into 5 groups. One group voted to create a mural about lizards and their various Australian environments; the other groups each chose a type of environment (desert, garden, forest or on trees) and after researching what they contain, created a mini environment. They made models of a lizard from that environment and painted it the correct colours. We have learned quite a bit in a short time ….. but again haven’t finished everything on time as we have also been doing our end of year tests.
2009 Term 2
24 August 2009
So the term is just rolling on by as swift as the winds of last week. The performance has become a lot of fun and we have had the joy of making the swords for the battle scene! Such joy! We have been creating some magical moments in the classroom with our projects; there is a huge diorama of a pet shop and a brilliant green house coming to life (among all the many other wonderful works of art in the class). We have some creepy crawly topics like Spiders, Snakes and sharks! There is fashion, cars and Pokemon too! Lots of fun! We have been singing songs, skipping and generally loving learning! What a life! It is very exciting to know that the performance is just a week away; lucky we have our lines down pat!
27 July 2009
Wow. What a busy week. Last week we learned how to think about what we have read so that we can understand all of the information. We looked at three different levels of comprehension – directly from the text, interpreting the text by putting facts together and thinking about what this infers and then seeing if there was some way of making a global comment also. After we read about ancient Greece and brainstormed together what we had learned, we discussed which level of understanding we had used. This was a hard concept for some children but others managed well. We will continue working with these levels of understanding this term. The children all planned their projects this week, making a mind map of ideas and thoughts of how they would meet the requested criteria. After this they created a timeline plan so that everything would be finished to their best ability by the 3rd of September. Michael, our student teacher, is now teaching the children with great enthusiasm and care, ensuring that they continue to learn at their individual levels and in areas that are relevant to their needs, projects and themes. Performance rehearsal continues to take most afternoons. The children are gradually learning their lines and dances, entrances and exits, etc. Performance Camp next week will consolidate this! (We hope!!) Of course, standard things like learning Letterland sounds (ou, ow), maths games and sheets, spelling, handwriting all continue too. Edith
11 May 2009
What a privilege it was this week to have 4 students from Vermont Secondary College come and share with us about their trip to France during the recent school holidays. Their teacher, Annie Fish, a past Village parent, helped them organize a terrific interactive session that helped us learn about similarities and differences between life in France and our Australian way of life. Tasting snails in garlic butter, eating camembert cheese on a slice of baguette and trying one of their spicy sweets were all part of our time with them. We learned to greet each other with a kiss on each cheek and while having a sit down meal at school every lunchtime seemed like a good idea, staying until 5pm and starting at about 8am certainly didn’t appeal.
26 April 2009
Welcome back for term 2. I trust everyone enjoyed their holidays. A big welcome to JC who has joined our group and is settling in very quickly. We also welcome Michael Caterer, a final year student teacher who will be with our group on and off during this year. This term our theme will be “Going on a World Trip” – learning about how people live around the world through reading the diaries that will return with our Flat people as they come back from their various holidays. Of course we will also need to use other materials to find out about life in these countries. We will make other stopovers too! The Harmony focus for the first two weeks is a great start to this trip. We started by thinking about similarities and differences within our friendship and class groups, looked at what is special about ourselves and each other and wrote ‘Who Am I?’ quizzes. A number of these showed insight and thoughtful wording. Hand prints have shown similarities whilst listing favourites, feelings and fingerprints highlights subtle differences as well as raising discussion about congenital and accidental disability. I can see this becoming an interesting journey!
2009 Term 1
30 March 2009
As first term and our theme on shapes and solids draws to a close, I would like to thank all the wonderful parent (and grandparent) helpers that have contributed to our program this term. Without your input the children’s school experiences would lack the richness that it has. Thanks to Angie, Charlotte and Lyndall for their regular guidance of games during our weekly learning centres. At this time the children are involved in a variety of activities which each have some specific learning opportunities. To name a few, this term we have included using tangrams to make pictures – both to designs and our own, investigated the terms ‘flip’, ‘slide’ and ‘turn’ and how each action changes the way a shape is looking, made solids from plasticine and then sliced them either vertically, horizontally or diagonally and looking at the shape of the new surface as well as how it changes the solid itself, looked at the attributes of various items (colour, size, shape, thickness, texture) and how changes in these can be used to make patterns, used a matrix and a venn diagram to sort objects, etc. Thanks also to Jonathon, T’s dad, who brought in and pulled apart a car motor so that the children could see what shapes are involved and how they interconnect to make the motor work. We discovered that motors have lots of cylinders and tubes of various sizes and that the nuts on the bolts all seemed to be hexagons. We also learned about the Otto cycle and how this makes the car go. Thanks also to Patricia, K’s grandmother, for her help with reading, classroom tasks and computer games and to Jenny, K’s Nana for being the bus helper on Wednesdays’ gymnastics trip. A huge thank you also goes to Cathy C for her wonderful effort with helping our group make the yummy hot cross buns. We learned to weigh out chunks of dough to make sure they were fairly sized, roll spheres between our palms and talked about yeast and Easter. I hope everyone has a wonderful Easter and a relaxing holiday break. P.S. Don’t forget to dress up in costume for the bush dance on Thursday! ?
23 March 2009
In our class we have been reading the book Flat Stanley. We all thought the adventures he was having sounded great and decided we would love to be posted somewhere different for a holiday too, so we have each created a flat version of ourselves. What great, observant artwork. This has also initiated some thoughtful introspection about who we are and what sort of person we would like to be, discussing appropriate friendship behaviours and making up a skit to demonstrate these. Next we thought about what sort of a diary we should keep on our holiday and designed a page that would include photos, pictures, journalling and interesting information about the location of our stay. Armed with photocopies of these pages, our Flat person will first record a stay at home with us and return to school to tell us about it. Then they will spend a few days at the home of a friend and return with their diary of that time. At the end of term they will be posted to a destination with a culture that is somewhat different from our own - preferably with family contacts overseas - and spend the 2 weeks of our holidays enjoying (and recording) the company, lifestyle and experiences that will help them (us) learn about the places in which they have stayed. Next term we will enjoy learning all about various cultures from the experiences of our Flat People! What fun!
16th February 2009
A big welcome to our new students who have arrived from Queensland. We are enjoying learning about each other as we investigate things to do with this term’s theme – Shapes and Solids. We have learned about regular 2D shapes and their names and enjoyed making some with a partner with our bodies. We looked around and found that there are many shapes around us in our school and environment and looked at the attributes that objects can have – shape, size, colour, thickness, texture, number and symmetry. Using these to make patterns we became quite creative and found that some patterns use more than one attribute between items. We started using shapes to make paper patterns for sewing doll’s clothes or bean bags and found that sewing is quite tricky, but fun. We are looking forward to finishing them this week. The horrendous bushfires gave rise to lots of discussion and some amazing drawings – mostly from imagination or television images, but some from experience. Thanks to the wonderful parents/grandparents who have offered to help in so many ways. We look forward to working with you.