Gymnastics

During Term One all children at St Paul the Apostle School participate in weekly gymnastic lessons. They are run by a qualified gymnastics teacher and supervised by the classroom teacher. Through out the program the children's skills are continually built upon and the activities become more complex. 

Physical activity is so beneficial to children as it helps stimulate their brains and combats childhood obesity. Emily, the gymnastics teacher, often challenges the children to continue to stretch their muscles even when they are watching the television, so the next time you see you child sitting enjoying some tv time maybe you could ask them to show you how to do the butterfly?

The children enjoy actively joining in with gymnastics lessons. You can find this weeks blog below:

An Afternoon At Gymnastics

 At gymnastics we start off with a warm up game. Our teacher's name is Emily. After our game Emily picks five leaders and then she numbers the class 1,2,3,4,5. After the children go to the right group we start the different activities.

Activity One: cartwheels or bunny hops if you can't do cartwheels. Then we use the hoola hoops.

Activity Two: balance beam with kicks followed by the lower balance beam while balancing a bean bag on our head.

Activity Three: Handstands and ring toss. The ring toss is harder than it looks!

Activity Four: Forward rolls and bunny hops

Activity Five: Mini tramp while doing a tuck. The hop through the hoops.

(Photos and blog by Patrick, Monique, Hannah and Samuel)

Check out the photos:

Balancing on the beam.

Cartwheels are harder than they look.

Count to ten before you come down.

Mini tramp is so much fun.

The children do the butterfly as part of the warm up.

They also enjoy happy cat.

Read- Alouds

Enjoying Reading Together

It is essential for children to read every day as it helps develop within the children a love for reading as well as a great way to develop comprehension, fluency and word attack skills.

In Year Three the children listen to the teacher read on a daily basis. One way for the children to develop a love for reading is for them to participate in in read-aloud sessions. These sessions involve the teacher thinking-allowed about different strategies to use to help understand the text, decipher unknown words or develop an understanding of the story being read. 

Currently we are enjoying the book 'Charlotte's Web' during read- aloud sessions. You may like to ask your child what has been happening in the story, who are the main characters or ask them to describe the setting of the story. When reading the story we have also been making a list of words that the children may not be familiar with. They are encouraged to use these words in their own writings. 

Today the children wrote a brief summary of what happens during a 'Read-aloud' session. 

We are listening to 'Charlotte's Web'. The characters in Charlotte's Web are Charlotte, Wilbur, Templeton, Fern and Avery. It is set on a farm in America.  When listening to Miss Veling we learn about ways we can work out unknown words and the meaning of the story. In our classroom we have a list of words from the book and our teachers have challenged us to use them in our work. 

James B, Aarushi, Sophia F, Tim 

 

We are reading 'Charlotte's Web'.

Miss Veling lets us hold her spider friend - Charlotte.

We all love our little pal - Wilbur.

The teachers share strategies they use when reading.

Mathematics

Structure of a Numeracy Block

 Over the last few years the teachers at St Paul the Apostle have been developing their understanding of how children best learn Mathematics. Everyday the children in Year Three participate in at least an hour of Mathematics. Recent research suggests that children need 200 hits of a mathematical idea or concept before they will consolidate their understanding. To help the children with achieving the 200 hits we participate in warm up games every day. They help the children use and develop their mental strategies.

There are three parts to our numeracy lessons.
Warm Up
Rich task 
Reflection Time.

In today's blog the children have written about one warm up activity that they enjoy playing. It is a great game for everyone in the family to play. You can always use pasta if you don't have counters. To simplify the game for younger children just make a target with tens and one or just ones. Of course you can also make a target the covers, tens of thousands or higher if you want to extend your learning. The same modifications can be done for the round the garden board. 

We would love to see photos or read comments about your families fun with our warm up game.

On Thursday we played the 'target game' followed by 'round and round the garden'. Follow these easy directions and you will be able to play it at home. 
Draw your own target (the photos will give you a clue) Drop five counters and then work out the number you will start on by counting how many tens and ones you have.
Now draw a round the garden. It doesn't have to be a garden it could be a racing track. Put a counter on one of the spaces. Roll the dice and move the counter the amount on the dice. Add or take away the amount from your number. Pass the dice to the left. Play for as long as you like.
At the end of our time we finished on 930. (Written by Thomas V, Joanna S, Tom K, Isabella M)

Things you will need:Target board, 'Round the Garden' board and dice.

 

Drop five counters and work out your starting number. We started with 320.

 

Place your counter on any square.

Roll the dice and move the amount on the dice.

Add or take away the amount in the square you land in.