Week 2 Update

 Good afternoon parents,

Welcome to the week! After a false start the week before last we have hit the ground running, learning our new routines and procedures and establishing positive relationships with each other and learning a little more about each other. I am sure that your little ones would have come home last week quite exhausted as there was a lot that we covered in our first week together. 

This week will be great as we will streamline and reinforce those procedures and start to sink our teeth a little further into our learning!

I would like to thank you all for your hard work in labelling, purchasing and sorting all the items needed to get us back to school. Your children were a real credit to you last week and I am very grateful! 

Each week I will send out a post that discusses some of the learning that has been happening in 4DEL and shares reminders about upcoming events within our class. I will notify you via email that I have updated our class blog.

REMINDERS - WEEK 1

Hats - I can please ask you to check in with your child to make sure they have a hat with their name clearly marked. I understand that some students are waiting on uniform orders for their hats to arrive...hopefully they come soon!

Book Covers - Can you please send in any book covers that may have arrived since we started last week. If your book order was missing them, can I please ask that you purchase them as soon as you are able and send them in with your child.

Haircuts - Just a reminder that haircuts must be in line with our school policy. I ask that you ensure that your child's hair is not too long at both the front and the back...if your child's fringe falls into their eyes, they will need to be pinning it back.

Laptop & Swimming Notes - Please make sure these are filled in, signed and returned as soon as possible. If you have lost your copy, please ask your son or daughter to let me know and I can organise another copy.

Parent Information Evening - As you would be aware, we are normally coming together for a chance to meet each other and share some of the ins and outs of our classes with you as parents. Due to COVID precautions, this year we will be sending home a digital copy of our presentation along with a short video that goes into more detail about some of the more important points to note. This will be available on our blogs by 4pm tomorrow (Monday).

Laptops - I am hoping that some of the excitement around this might have died down! If not, rest assured it will! A few things to note:

• Charging - a charge every second day should be sufficient to keep their laptop running as needed.
• Rules - if you haven't already, we highly recommend you setting your ground rules early. Our goal is to support your family rules as best we can...there will be very few occurrences through the year where the laptop must be used. We are constantly reminding your children that these devices are a privilege and belong to you.
• If you are comfortable with your child customising their laptop with stickers, photos for their background or downloading additional games - that is completely up to you. Please note that no games will be played on laptops at school.
• If your child forgets their laptop we ask that you don't race home to get it...this doesn't help them learn their lesson and we can adjust our teaching accordingly. If your child is regularly forgetting their laptop or it is not coming sufficiently charged, they will be given an infringement note. This will be taken to Mr Lee for some follow up discussion and then brought home to be signed by you. I would appreciate some additional follow up discussion around this and then if you can sign it to be returned to me the bext day.

OUR LEARNING - WEEK 1 

We had a great start to the week! We completed a small maths assessment as well as a spelling assessment which will be used to help group the students for this semester. 

We kicked off our Writing genre with a cold task designed to show what we already know about writing Narratives. In the coming weeks, we will be learning about the structure of a narrative, the kind of language that we should be using and how to REALLY entertain our reader.

In our maths sessions, we have begun looking at odd and even numbers, as well as writing and ordering them. This week we will begin looking at place value and understanding that numbers have a place and a value.

We have been working on setting some goals for our term and getting to know each other a little better through our art...hopefully these will be finished and up for display soon!

In science we have begun looking at changes in the earth and which of these have occurred because of human activity or natural processes.

In religion, we have been talking about what a relationship is, who we have them with and where do these different relationships sit in relation to us. This unit ties in beautifully with our Friendology sessions around working on positive friendships and strategies we can use if things aren't going well.

We will begin our reading and spelling group rotations this week and we will be looking at some reader's theatre to help us practice expression in our reading, we also be working on our comprehension and creative writing in these sessions.

We have had our first session in HASS with Mr Sherbourne who is covering for Mrs Meyer this term as well as Mrs Kartana refreshing our memories and Mrs Sinclair put us through our paces. We missed our dance session with Mrs Haines on Friday as we attended mass as a whole school which was really lovely, we look forward to showing her our new moves next week!

HOMEWORK - WEEK 2

Your child will be bringing their homework book home with them tomorrow. We have shown the children how to complete their homework and explained the learning grid to them.

This grid will be updated each week to include upcoming events or to add or take away an activity.

Homework is due in on Friday's.

They will be asked to:

• Complete a LCWC of their spelling words each night focusing on segmenting them into the sounds they can hear in each word.
• Choose 5 of their list words and write a sentence for each. This is to be done neatly and using correct punctuation.
• Practice their tables out loud in order, out of order, back to front and front to back!
• Read for 10-15 minutes.
• Complete 4 tasks from the grid at the bottom.

If we can ask that you sign down the bottom to show that your child has completed the assigned tasks over the week.

Thank you so much for a great start to the term, if you have any questions about any of the above, please do not hesitate to get in touch!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend,

Mrs Delane