Issue 3 / 6 March 2015
Junior School Bulletin
Junior School News I had a lovely morning in the Prep classes recently and was able to participate with the students in their learning activities. In the first room I visited, the students were sorting and classifying. Sorting and classifying objects promotes logical thinking and the application of rules. It teaches students about the relationships that exist between different objects. In the second room, the students were creating numbers out of playdough. This practice of heightening self-awareness to the form of the number by creating it with play dough, helps them to remember the shape of this number. The students were also asked to put the number of apples on the apple tree to represent the number they were modelling. This teaches the children the relationship between the number’s form and what it represents.
Last Friday’s swim carnival was an outstanding success that saw Binging win for the third year in a row. Wardjam put up a great fight and it came down to the relays at the end of the day to determine the winner. Congratulations to the students who were age champions on the day. It is very evident that these students have worked very hard to become accomplished swimmers. What impressed me most throughout the whole day was the level of sportsmanship shown by the students. One event in particular was the 11 years Boys Freestyle Final. It was a very close race and there was only a fingernail separating first and second. The boy who came second reached over the lane rope and congratulated the boy who came first - exemplifying the sort of character we strive to develop at St Andrews.
Last Tuesday we held the first Mufti Day for 2015. The focus was on ‘Welcoming the Stranger’, that is welcoming the person who comes to our country from a background different to our own. The day raised $1463 to go towards the Australian Lutheran World Service (ALWS) efforts to support refugees globally.
The third group was working on sentence structure and reading. They were asked to finish off this sentence “I went to the ....” One of the students suggested “beach”. The teacher asked the children to act out what this might look like. This was an important step, because it allowed the students to relate the written word to what it represents. Later the same group were looking at the letter “t” and identifying words that contain the letter t and reading them in context. It was great to see all of the students engaged in their learning and the teachers setting foundation level tasks that will move them onto the next stage of their learning.
Darrin Schumacher Head of Junior School darrins@salc.qld.edu.au