Week 9

This week has been full of fun with Spirit Week and all its accompanying activities. The children really enjoyed getting involved and there were smiling faces everywhere. The final day of Spirit Week was celebrated with a whole school 'Wake Up, Shake Up' and shared fatour, both of which elicited great enthusiasm. It was very rewarding to see the respect shown by students to our support staff during the shared fatour, offering them food and ensuring they were well catered for.

In class we began our work on addition and subtraction strategies which was an eye opener for all. Most students had never realised there are so many easier and different ways to work out problems other than by traditional algorithms and they became engrossed in the strategies they were working with. The idea is that they will, over time, be able to decide the strategies that they feel most comfortable using and then apply these quite naturally.

Differentiated reading has brought groups together who are at similar places in their reading growth. Many children are able to read the words in more difficult texts than those we are working with at present but their understanding does not always match their word recognition. By working at the correct instructional levels we are able to continue to develop reading skills and use follow up activities to reinforce and stretch individual capabilities. We will be continuing this for some time with an aim to growing comprehension along with reading ages.

We have continued to focus on values in connection with our unit work. Some children are now able to separate values from beliefs by putting them into two categories; the actions we have that are important to us in the way we treat others and the beliefs that are part of us through our religious and cultural affiliations. The challenge is trying to determine how these two areas can be separate but how they are also connected. We are moving into investigating different religions so that we become more aware of similarities and differences within and between them.

We had an unexpected highlight on Thursday when Ms Evie brought in a group of Year 13 girls to entertain us with a poem that linked to our unit then taught us how to act out different parts of speech. The challenge now is for us to remember what we learned!

Next week we would like children to accompany parents to their PTS conferences. Students have been asked to discuss mid semester reports with their parents in advance so that areas for goal setting have been considered before the meeting. As there are only 10 minutes per child allowed please be on time so that we keep to schedule and don't cause others to be inconvenienced. It looks like it will be another busy week at KICS.


Year 4, Week 9 on PhotoPeach