Topic

This week in topic, we learnt about the Aboriginal people and the history of their culture. We started by exploring the enquiry question: What was it like to live as an Aboriginal person? We researched lots of different information about what food they ate and how they hunted, where they lived, how they communicated and what their flag represents. After that, we explored Aboriginal art and discovered that they used this to tell stories and communicate to each other. Next, we explored techniques used by creating symbols with dots with cotton buds and paint. Finally, we created our own final piece of a crocodile, a kangaroo or a dingo using dots and symbols. Later on in the week, we learnt about some Aboriginal dream stories and role played some of these. After that, we learnt about Aboriginal music and got to look at a real didgeridoo. Finally, we then performed some Aboriginal music based on the dream stories that we learnt.

Maths

This week in maths, we continued learning a new method of addition: column addition. We started by adding two 2-digit numbers where the ones added together bridged 10 using dienes in a tens frame. We discovered that when we added the ones that bridged 10, we needed to exchange 10 ones for 1 ten and put this under our answer to remind us that we need to add this in to the tens. We practised this lots during the week and eventually we were all using jottings or abstract numbers to solve addition problems in column. At the end of the week, we started learning about equal and unequal groups and what this means. We used a multiplication frame and counters to solve questions such as “There are 3 groups ducks with 2 in each group. How many ducks altogether?”. We used the stem sentence “There are 3 groups of 2 ducks. There are 6 altogether”.

Topic

This week during Topic we have been planning and writing a story opening for ‘Finding Nemo’. We have been focusing on including a character description and a setting description to engage the reader into the story. This weeks vocabulary focus has been on including verbs and adverbs within our writing for example ‘The fish darted quickly through the colourful coral’. We started off by watching a clip from the beginning of the film where it introduces the main characters and the setting. We gathered verbs and adverbs from this clip in order to describe the main nouns in the setting. We explored how we could incorporate all the senses into our writing for example ‘The sound of water moving swiftly over the seabed’. We then used the words we had gathered to create a plan for our story opening, we picked five key nouns to describe and wrote a verb and adverb for each of those nouns. Finally, we were ready to write our story openings, we were able to write some amazing sentences that introduce the reader to the characters and setting.

This week in the Geography part of our Topic we have also been exploring more of Australia’s landscape focusing on Sydney and Uluru. We compared Sydney to London looking at the similarities and differences between the two cities. We watched a video of Barnaby bear and his journey from London to Sydney. We then used a Venn diagram to sort images into London, Sydney and both. The second part of our Geography lessons looked at Uluru, we looked at the different geographical features of Uluru and discussed the human impact on the environment there. We were then able to apply this knowledge to label the main features of the Ulura rock.

Maths

This week during Math we have been learning about the concept of difference in relation to subtraction. We started off by exploring what difference meant, we did this by comparing object from around the classroom and explaining which part showed the difference. We established from this that the difference was ‘how much more’ was needed of either an amount or a unit of measure in order to make the two things that we were comparing the same. We used the stem sentence‘ We are comparing the size of ____and ____. This part is the difference in size between ____ and ____.’ to explain our reasoning. Once we had an understanding of what the difference was, we were able to apply this knowledge in a range of contexts for example ordering the heights of towers.

For the next lesson we moved on to comparing the difference in the context of children with sweets, we used cubes to represent the sweets that we were comparing. For example ‘Sally has 5 sweets, Tim has 7 sweets. How many more sweets does Tim have than Sally?’ We used the stem sentence ‘The difference between ( 7) and (5) is (2) because (7) is (2) more than (5).’ to explain our reasoning.We then moved on to forming number sentences to find the difference, for example 7- 5= 2, so I know that the difference between 7 and 5 is 2.