The first inquiry this term centres on welcoming our parent community. We will be holding a Welcome festival on Wednesday 29th February where the children will invite our parent, family and friends to attend a celebration of our neighbourhoods. The children have selected a workshop group from three choices including event management, entertainment and documentation. The event management group will work within a budget, to prepare refreshments, to design a schedule and usher system while the entertainment group will work on preparing an original neighbourhood song to sing on the day, perform original poems and host the event. The documentation group will record through film, photos, recordings and writing everything that happens in the preparation of this event. This will be presented on the festival day. For the children this will be an exciting way to get to know each other and to collaborate on an event.
Our specific curriculum focus areas that are built in to this inquiry include the reading, performing and appreciation of poetry as a genre for invitation writing. A variety of texts, including a serial and the investigation of graphic novels will be explored as a way of examining the meaning of friendship and effective communities.
The number focus will be based on the concepts of place value including whole numbers to 100, 000 and on into decimals, fractions and percentages for those children who have a sound working knowledge of whole numbers and the base 10 system. We have pre-tested the children in order to establish their current understandings in this area and the results of this will be in their portfolios as of the end of week 2. Outside of number there will be opportunities for children to work with ratio, number operations, time, metric measure and temperature depending on the workshop inquiry.
In word study we will be focusing on the correct spelling of words common to the neighbourhood and establishing word study log books. Children are expected to learn 3 words each week that they will use regularly, so please encourage this as a home learning activity.
For ICT we will be establishing on-line reading logs so that children can record what they have read and a comment about their appreciation of the text. Again this is another opportunity for home learning. Children in the documentation inquiry will spend time learning about cameras, recording and editing.
Kerri is the key contact person for overseeing student learning generally in both neighbourhoods so please feel very welcome to approach her with any queries, concerns or comments. Areas of responsibility for key learning areas are as follows:
Numeracy – Kerri and Patrick
Reading – Keith and Sheryal
Writing – Tomo and Sheryal
ICT – Tomo, Patrick
Inquiry learning - Kerri
