Connections everywhere

We started Monday of week 3 with the important task of allocating class jobs. We have messengers, lunch monitors and door monitors all the way to line leaders and library monitors. And everyone did a fabulous day of fullfilling their duties. On to spelling and working out what sort of rules we were looking at this week. We worked out that there were words that had the 'ee' sound in them, ones beginning with 'uni' which we found out means 'one' and also that plurals are usually formed by just adding 's' and they mean 'more than on'. 

 This term in reading we are looking at the super six comprehension strategies. These six strategies are: making connections, making predictions, summarising, inferring, visualising and questioning. Today we started looking at 'making connections' with 4S and Mr Smyth. We talked about the different sort of connections we can make when we are reading. They are 'text-text', 'text-world' and 'text-self' connections. When we listen to a story or read a book and we notice something in the book that reminds us of something we have been through or seen or done, we are making a 'text-self' connection. We got to write our connections on post-it notes and put them up in Mr Smyth's room. Here is why making connections is important: Students who make connections while reading are better able to understand the text they are reading. It is important for students to draw on their prior knowledge and experiences to connect with the text. Students are thinking when they are connecting, which makes them more engaged in the reading experience. 

 After recess we got put into our Number Groups. These will be fluid for the first few weeks as we make sure that everyone is in the right place. We will be having number groups on Monday, Tuesday and Friday after recess for one hour. I'm already looking forward to number groups tomorrow! Maths was one of my favourite subjects when I was in primary school. Well to be honest I really loved most of the subjects in primary school! Back to class and we got given our HSIE books and got to get our title page ready for this term's work. We will be looking into ANZAC Day a little more deeply this year as it is the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. We will also be exploring communities around us and hopefully connect with another primary school in NSW to write some letters as penpals. I'm just finalising this connection! I have my fingers crossed that we get to go ahead with this. Lunch was over before we knew it and we came in to talk about what a 'narrative' is and what makes it a story. We talked about 'characters', the 'setting' and of course the 'problem' that is overcome in the story. We came up with some interestingly named characters and settings and some violent problems. I particularly liked the story about a group of talking fruit who lived in a fruit bowl. Unfortunately for them they had to deal with the problem of being eaten! We spoke about our homework today. Homework will be handed out on Mondays and usually go home. Today we did some of our homework 'mentals' since we only have one week until homework is due. We will also set out our homework books tomorrow just the way that I like them. We need to wait until tomorrow as there are many homework books that haven't made their way to school yet. Finally we packed our bags with numerous notes and it was home time. Wow! What a busy day!