Tag Archives: engaging

3 Fred report . . .

What S3 Fred has been doing!!
Hello everyone! Have a read of what S3Fred has been doing !!

Our class had to decide on a class name. We voted for Fred Hollows out of Nancy Bird, Ned Kelly and Pemulwuy. We voted for him because he was very intelligent and he gave back eyesight to people. He worked with indigenous people to build a medical centre to treat eye disease. He then went to work in Africa in a place called Eritrea. He created a lens factory and trained other people to treat the eye disease. He died in 2008 from cancer but his wife created the Fred Hollows foundation to continue his work.

Well, we did some contract work, we had to choose what activities we wanted to do and when we wanted to do them. That was a lot of fun!! What S3Fred has been doing this week!!
Hello everyone! Have a read of what S3Fred has been doing this week!!

We also looked at Bloom’s Taxonomy tasks, the levels are remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating and creating! They are from low to high thinking skills.
Also we did reading tasks, we picked a book to read chapters 1 and 2 and choose from different tasks. A few examples are draw your favourite character from the book and 5 questions you would ask the author and there were more activities to choose from. That was really an amazing thing to do!!

S3 Fred have been working out strategies to help us with the NAPLAN Tests. Last week we did a math test to see what things we need to learn and made goals from what we didn’t know. Miss York set us some work that matches our goals. We do worksheets and play Mathletics to achieve our goals.

We have also been writing our narrative quality criteria, it means things that make a good narrative these were some of our answers complex sentences, orientation, complication, resolution, who, what, where, when and why. We have also been learning about descriptions for our narrative. We had to use our imagination and think about different settings. We were playing a game called the circle game, whoever had the ball had to say something that is shiny some of our answers were gold, earrings, necklace, diamond and a gold key. For NAPLAN we have been learning about our senses to put into our narrative we had to think about our five senses and pretend that we were in a setting eg shopping centre, cemetery, hospital, jungle, desert, and forest.

Maths in action in Stage 3

Our Maths Program is personalised to suit each student’s personal needs. All the Stage 3 classes have done a diagnostic Maths Test.

The students and their teacher analysed the results of this test. They worked together to determine individual strengths and weaknesses and the where to next for the student.

Armed with this knowledge the students set their own Maths goals for the term.

Read IT! Bookworm Home Reading Program.

Notes went home today asking our parents  to help their children become better readers by participating in our READ IT! Bookworm Home Reading Program. All students Stage 1 to Stage 3 will be asked to participate in this program.

In the bundle of notes we outline  our expectation that parents should read with their child at least 5 times a week for 20 minutes each time.

We ask our parents to sign a contract saying they or another responsible person will listen to their child read for 20 minutes, 5 times a week.

We need our students to get better at Reading. We have our intensive Reading Program operating in our classrooms and we need our parents to help us out at home.

Taking a walk . . .

Engrossed in writing

This was the title of our writing task for the month of February. Every month our students will be facing the challenge of a whole school writing task.

Once the topic is determined by the Principal stimulus pictures and the task are loaded onto our school server. From there the teachers retrieve the document and display the stimulus pictures on their IWB.

This is followed by a great deal of discussion about the pictures and then the task is analysed. The discussion is designed to develop a rich vocabulary using lots of WOW words that make writing more exciting and interesting to read.

Students follow a stage appropriate proforma to help them plan their writing. This helps them remember the structure needed when writing. They plan their writing before drafting their response to the task. Once finished writing they then use a checklist to ensure they have correct spelling, interesting words, punctuation, grammar etc. They edit their work and then hand it to their teacher.

The writing is ranked according to the Australian National Writing Assessment Rubric across individual classes, stages and finally the whole school. Once these have been ranked the students have their work back and they evaluate it and assess it in terms of the appropriate writing rubric for each stage.

Students are acknowledged for their writing through publication on the school blog and with an Assembly Certificate along with house and class points.

Our students come from cultures which are not known for their written histories they are more oral/aural with colourful artwork. The oral stories are wonderful and the artwork amazing. Convention in our culture requires writing. We want them to write and write well . . . this takes concerted effort and training.

S 3 Clark . . . Why we chose our class name.

Written by Mutu and Haley

Each class at Belmore South had to learn about 4 famous Australians and then choose one to be their class name. We had to choose between Graeme Clark, Marie Bashir, Deborah Mailman and Dick Smith.

It was a hard choice but we were only allowed to choose one. Graeme Clark and Dick Smith were very close. We had a bit of a debate about why people chose them. Some people changed their votes and Graeme Clark won. Most people chose him because of his great work for deaf people. We think he is a great role model and an inspiration to everyone.

For his great work he received some very prestigious awards.

Here is some information about Graeme Clark
Why is he a famous Australian?
Professor Graeme Clark invented the Bionic Ear with a team of scientists in the 1970s. They worked in Melbourne, Australia.
The Bionic Ear is worn by over 100,000 deaf people in over 80 countries.

How does the Bionic Ear work?
The Bionic Ear is properly called a cochlear implant. It is an artificial hearing tool. The Bionic Ear helps a deaf person to hear another person speak.

There are 2 parts to the Bionic Ear.
One part is placed under the skin behind a person’s ear. This is done in a hospital during an operation. The parts placed under the skin are the electronic equipment needed to control the flow of electricity into the ear and the equipment needed to change electrical signals into speech.

The second part is worn on the outside of the body. There is a microphone to pick up the voice of the person speaking, a speech processor which turns the voice sounds into electrical signals and a transmitting coil which sends the signals to the equipment inside the deaf person’s ear.

Why invent the Bionic Ear?
Professor Graeme Clark’s father had a hearing problem and didn’t have a very good hearing aid. Clark from young age liked conducting experiments and this interest led to him doing a degree in medicine. He entered into a partnership with a friend of his father’s, learning to be an expert nose and plastic surgeon.

However it still frustrated him seeing profoundly deaf people come and go realising that he couldn’t help them. But then he read an article by an American surgeon and was inspired to go and research electrically stimulating the hearing. He then decided to leave and go and live as a research student at the University of Sydney. Money and financial successes were unimportant to him. This began his research path to inventing the Bionic Ear.

World Maths Day in S3 Clark

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Written by Farah, Angela and Kim

On Wednesday we had our own world maths day. On this day there were lots of maths stations set up around the room. These stations were:
– Computers: We logged onto Mathletics and competed in the World Maths Day Challenge. We were helping to break the world record.
– Hidden Symbols: where you draw a picture and you have to include as many maths symbols in it as you can so people can’t find it. Then you get someone to try and spot the symbols in your picture.
– Maths is all around us: we had to find anything to do with maths in the newspapers. We could also write and draw other things we new were to do with maths. We put these on 2 posters.
– Maths board games: there were lots of different maths games we could play.
– Problem solving: here there was lots of problem solving puzzles to do with number and time.
We had a lot of fun and want to do it again next year.

Teachers working together to benchmark our students’ writing

We have a regular writing task which is undertaken by our students once a month, 8 times a year. This is our WRITE IT! Program. it is designed to improve our students’ writing skills and develop consistency of judgement from stage to stage among our teachers.

The students are supported with scaffolded expectations and their field of knowledge is developed through exposure to a variety of visual stimulus pictures and discussion appropriate for each task set.

After the task is completed our teachers rank them in stages: top, middle and bottom. They are then ranked across stages.
The class teacher in consultation with colleagues then selects the best in their class.

The Best in Class is awarded a certificate and has their writing published on the School Blog for the world to see.

The students’ evaluate their own work using an adaptation of the NAPLAN rubric. Using this information they set their goals to ensure they improve their writing when they participate in the next writing task.