Semester 2 was a little different this year…. completing most of our learning remotely! 3/4E have done such an amazing job adapting to working online and I am super proud and happy with the wonderful work students have produced on Google Classroom (GC). They have developed a range of skills and abilities during this challenging time.
We dived straight into Term 3, learning about the Tokyo Olympics and this was a favourite part of remote learning. We were able to utilise the Olympics across a variety of subjects, from English to geography to visual arts to maths. Students enjoyed dressing up in Zoom to represent their country of origin and designing new Olympic Sports for Brisbane 2032.
In English we have been focusing on:
- building our persuasive Writing skills in using the Seven Steps to Writing. Using these new persuasive techniques, the students were able to write a letter to their parents or teacher persuading them to buy a pet tarantula. I was so convinced of their reasons, I nearly bought one for the class!
- listening to and writing different forms of poetry to engage a reader’s imagination and emotions. Students have produced some excellent poems this term, from acrostic to rhyming couplets.
- listening and reading along to our class novel Nim’s Island and completing various tasks relating to the 6 comprehension strategies. We loved ‘Going Troppo’, dressing up as tourists on Zoom.
For our maths lessons, we have continued our learning path to build skills around a range of mathematical concepts, from using differentiated Google Sheets to show whole numbers, addition and subtraction with trading, multiplication and division, fractions and decimals to measuring length, volume and mass. I was really impressed with the students who resubmitted their work after making corrections to their work.
Students have also visited China, Madagascar and Brazil as part of our geography unit on Earth’s Environment and we are now venturing to the unknown planet of Zog in our ‘Space Invaders’ science unit where we focus our learning on living things.
While most of us learned from home, Zoom kept us connected as a class twice a day. Students looked forward to guessing what costume I would be wearing each day or to join in drawing and interactive games. We cannot wait to be back in class where we can work together, debate topics, listen to others, and most importantly, see everyone's happy faces in real life. What an adventure we have been on so far!
