Week 5 Term 2

LC4 have had a busy week including lots of discussion around their goals for their learning. Each week we ask the students to write goals for their dispositional, numeracy and literacy learning. They're also supported to identify two ways they may be able to achieve these goals, their goals can then be used to help them plan their week. You can support this learning at home by asking your children to share their goals or their progress towards these goals.

Collaborative Research Project
LC4 had a visitor on Monday and Tuesday as a researcher spent time with us to investigate what collaboration at HPPS looks like. The researcher, Chris Bradbeer is conducting this research as part of his PhD research, he had many positives to share about the learning that was taking place in LC 4 and I know some children enjoyed being able to talk to a him about what he was doing. Chris also spent time with a group of students to talk about their ideas of collaboration. Thank you to all those who returned permission slips for his focus group.

"We talked about how the teachers work together and it made us think about how we work together in our groups. This might help us for our collaborative writing project."

Inventive Thinking Projects
This week some of groups have been making good progress on their projects building objects for our garden, designing systems for our device management and writing recipes, letters and newsletters.

"We watched a YouTube video on how to make a pallet garden, we put the weed mat in and had to be able to see some light underneath. It was easy to make and we think it will work, well we're pretty sure. We wonder why you need to see light underneath. We also wrote a letter to send to Bunnings asking them for soil and plants."

Pink Shirt Day
Pink Shirt Day is a chance for people to stand up to bullying and is a national campaign, you can find out more by visiting Pink Shirt Day Some of our students decided that this was a cause worth supporting and organised posters, notices and a bit of excitement in the school.

"Making our posters we learnt that we need to include important information like what we are promoting, why people should wear a pink shirt and when they need to do it. We also learnt that we have to think about who needs to know, the children in LC1 and 2 won't remember so we had to print off notices for those children really quickly at the end of the day. It was a job we had to do fast but we got it done."

"I learnt about counting money and grouping ten 10 cent pieces to make $1. I had to speak to LC3 and I didn't know when to start, so I just started by introducing myself."

 

New Online Tool Alert

MathsBuddy has been highly recommended to us by the specialist teachers at our secondary school. We are going to use this to help to boost our students understanding of maths knowledge, skills and confidence.  This is less of a games based tool and we feel it will compliment our model of learning through inquiry and also help consolidate skills learnt during our workshops.

The tasks set relate to either what we have noticed during our general maths assessments and the data tells us that there are gaps or may be set from what connections we make to the students passion and collaborative projects.

We are going to trial it for the next couple of weeks then refine how we use it.  You will be able to access it from home and results get sent to Reid and I so we can analyse progress and help the children to set goals, access learning and then apply it.

There is a demo you can watch if you have some time.

StudyLadder

Lots of the children have been utilising this tool.  This one is a little more games based and the children should be accessing the tasks we set in personalised pods to help them to meet goals.  They are able to access other games/tasks on this site - they are still learning however for those who tend to get more distracted than others it may pay to check in and see if they know why they are learning it and how it relates to learning in the common.

Conference Notes

We have been sending home notes via email and thank you for taking the time to read them and comment (if you want to).  

We encourage commenting as strong relationships between home and school strengthens learning for children.  There is a lot of research to support this and this is why one of our core values at the school is developing 'relationships' and conferences are one of the practices we have to support this.