Welcome back for Term 3

Hi all,

Welcome back to Room 20 for Term 3, and a busy term it promises to be.

We have our syndicate production coming up in Week 6, along with competitive swimming throughout the term, beginning next Friday with the school trials.  We also, of course, have Goal Setting meetings next week, and I hope to see you all there.

Our topics this term, apart from Production, are Earthquakes and Volcanoes (appropriately) and Food and Nutrition.

For Reading, we will be focusing on "real-life" reading, such as newspapers, advertisements, packaging, symbols, icons, graphics, etc; we will be also reading Poetry, studying inferring the main idea and the language features of poetry.

For Writing, we will be focusing on learning how to write explanations and a range of different types of poems.

For Maths, we will be focusing on Multiplication, Division, Fractions/Decimals/Proportions, time and geometric transformation.  Also, in order to improve the recall of basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts, we will be starting to do weekly timed basic facts tests, where everybody can practise at home and school throughout the week.  There will be a collection of facts to learn.  To "graduate" from having to do this, the aim is for the students to complete the 50 problem test in 2 minutes with at least 96% accuracy.

At home, we expect the students to be working on the goals that they have set themselves, silent reading, websites Reading Eggs and Mathletics, the Basic Facts Ladder and writing in their personal writing books.  I would like to collect the writing books every Friday.

Again, if you have any queries, please feel free to come and see me or Rachel before or after school.  We're happy to help out as best we can.

Thanks