How quickly this first term has flown by! It has been exciting to see our students’ developing understanding of concepts they are studying and to witness the growth in their social skills and friendships. Over the past few weeks we have been making volcanoes out of sand and clay, observed how the ‘lava’ flows and the landscape changes, when they ‘erupt.’ Additionally, we have made ‘rain events’ after the eruptions to show what occurs with heavy rainfall and flooding. This week we built our landscapes out of pavlova bases, painted the features with food colouring, made muffin volcanoes to sit on the base and used condensed milk as lava flows. It was a very messy, sticky but fun activity which allowed us to again reinforce our environmental concepts. In English, our students are focusing on text structures (repetition, rhyme and sound patterns) and sound devices, such as alliteration (six silly snakes) and onomatopoeia (a word that sounds like what it refers to or describes, e.g. moo, meow ). Our students have read lots of poems, written their own poems modelled on their reading and have made a beautiful class poem. Using onomatopoetic words to provide a sensory effect and vivid imagery in terms of sight and sound, the poem created by our students, is included below.

We would like to wish all our students and their families a safe and happy Easter!

Warm regards,

Libby, Tegan, Jasmine, Kelly, Darren, Tahlia, Zane, Ray, Henry, Braydan, Tommy, Savannah, Marcus, Peter, Jed and Gorgia.