STUDENT INFORMATION

The Kinders have been very excited to be back at school! We have started a unit called ‘All About Me’ and have been talking about our families, who is in our families and what we love to do with our family. We drew a picture and shared our ideas using the ‘snowball’ strategy, which was lots of fun!
We have also shown some great collaboration skills in Maths, working together to order numbers and doing ‘Dot Talks’.

Year 1 has kicked off their PBL unit this week in style! We arrived on Tuesday to classrooms covered in old uniforms and we are now in the process of hatching a plan to recycle, reuse and repurpose them. Year 1 would love to hear your ideas for solving this problem, so please feel free to pop a note in the letterbox outside our classroom or email Miss Mitchell.

We have enjoyed exploring numbers in maths through group challenges that have resulted in the Year 1’s discovering some very effective strategies for counting very large numbers. This has proven quite useful as we incorporate maths into our PBL unit, sorting and counting waste that we collected from around our school.

Thank you for making me feel so welcome this term! It has been wonderful getting to know so many of the amazing people in the St John’s community. If you need to get in touch with me, my email is brittney.mitchell@stjls.nsw.edu.au
I would love to hear from you.

We’ve arranged for Brittney is around to meet families either Wednesday 11th May after school from 3:20pm (come a few minutes earlier to pop into the classroom until our meeting at 3:40pm or Friday morning from 8:55am until the bell rings at 9:15am to pop in to say hello. Alternatively please send an email via Brittney or the office if you need an appointment.

Creative and critical thinking took place in RT 2 in their learning activities.

After Mrs Thomas visited the Van Gough Melbourne Expedition, she was inspired to share this with the students. In Art they re-created the Sunflower picture, using crayon and colour wash. In Mathematics, the students had opportunities to create their own challenging shapes problem for their peers to solve. Reading in year 2 is always fun, it doesn’t matter where you do it if it is happening.

The Year 3/4 classes finally presented their first PBL showcase! As it was our first, we thought we would just showcase to the other Year 3/4 class and our buddy class 2RT. We then got some surprise guest visits from Mr Moss, Mrs Bothe, and Year 5/6 students. Due to absences some students had to bravely present on their own. I was super proud of how confidently students spoke and explained their new event they had created. With the completion of a self-evaluation form, the new skills the students gained during the PBL unit ranged from computer skills, collaboration/teamwork, how to create, design and use imagination, creating flyers and posters, presenting to others and more...
BEFORE the showcase, students spoke of how they were feeling. Some responses were: nervous, excited, what if my work is not good enough, what if people laugh, what if we cannot answer their questions? AFTER the showcase, students said: happy, confident, proud, good, enjoyed having people come in, tired and out of breath from talking. It was great to reflect on how quite often when we do things for the first time and have present to others, it is normal to be nervous and afterwards we realise it was not as bad as we had thought.

What a terrific start to Term 3 Year 3-4 LK have had. The students have begun the term by completing their PBL from Term 1. On Friday, the students shared their solutions to the driving question “How can we as community builders create and host a celebration that brings joy and a sense of belonging to our community?” The students displayed a wonderful understanding of what is involved in hosting an event and had many examples of how they had made their events welcoming. All students showed a high level of creativity in the works they produced for their displays. They should all be very proud of their efforts. We will include some more photos in next week’s class letter.

Project Based Learning
This term the students are thoroughly enjoying creating their models of their new learning spaces. Next Friday the 13th May will be our show case. We cannot wait!

Albury Schools Netball Cup
On the 7th of April we entered in four teams of netball in the Albury Schools Cup Carnival. The carnival gave students the opportunity to participate in competitive and non- competitive netball. This was a great opportunity for our students with lots of netball experience, as well as those with limited experience to have a go and have lots of fun playing in a team sport.

One of our competitive teams the St John’s Superstars a 5/6 mixed team finished second in division and therefore played in the final. They won this final and now will play in the Riverina Regional Final on the the 21st of June in Wagga.

Thank you so much to the following parents who helped coach on the day- Shannon Tuohey, Toni Terlich, Bron Gabrielle and Georgina Cossor. Thank you to all the St John’s Students who participated on the day, it was a lot of fun and great sportsmanship was shown.

Year 5 Buddies