In 1/PE the Preps wrote about the Mini Sports Expo held on Wednesday 4th November.  Here is some of their work.

On Wednesday at school I played Mini  Sports. They had three sports. The sports were basketball and soccer and taekwondo. My favourite  was taekwondo and basketball.     
By Anahid.

On Wednesday I went to Mini  Sports. My favourite was taekwondo because the man was funny.
 By Indianna.

On Wednesday we did soccer and I won a prize.  I am going to play soccer next year.                        

On Monday 26th October, all students at TVPS participated in our first annual Maths Day.   Students participated in various problem solving activities and  received some house points for their answers.

On Tuesday 27th October students participated in our Weird Hair Day.  Everyone’s hair styles looked fabulous!

Grade 1L children have begun participating in Circle Time.  Circle Time is when the students and teacher sit in a circle and connect socially and emotionally through games or discussions.  Circle Time encourages social interaction, decision-making, discussing opinions, sharing ideas and trouble-shooting.  Our Circle Time toy, Huggie helps us share with others. 

On Monday 19 October Level 2 joined the TVPS community in a very special assembly, to officially open the new sustainability area.  Of particular interest are our new chooks, of which one chook actually laid an egg on the day.  To mark the occasion Level 2 created and wore “chicken hats”. The sustainability area has been established by students, teachers and parents to demonstrate the importance of recycling, composting and planting, in an attempt to care for our valuable environment.  Today 2D actually visited the sustainability area and said “g’day” to our chooks, Patsy and Ruby!

On Wednesday 9th September we had a Mini Italian Day at TVPS.  Students came to school dressed up in Italian colours.  All students attended an entertaining and very funny Italian Show.  The students also enjoyed pizza for lunch and delicious gelato in the afternoon.  It was a great day!

On Monday 31 August 2009, Level 2 students along with the entire TVPS community, participated in a fun footy parade, during morning assembly.  Each of the 16 AFL teams were represented, by students and teachers who dressed up, in their football teams’ colors.  
After our assembly, our Level 2 students engaged in a “Tabloid Sports session” based on football skills….….even Mrs Psarakis had a go at hand-balling a football into a net!  Special thanks to Bronte Lambert for organizing our very enjoyable Tabloid Sports event.  
The Level 2 students, with the assistance of their teachers, then created a “human bar graph” depicting how many students support each of the 16 AFL teams.  It seems that Collingwood, Carlton and Essendon are the three most popular AFL football teams, within Level 2.

This week, the grade one and two students are enjoying Book Week.  On Monday morning, each child came to school dressed as their favourite book characters and participated in a school parade.  We had lots of fun!

Our grade have enjoyed reading many books by Roald Dahl. So far we have read The Twits, The Magic Finger, The Enormous Crocodile and George’s Marvellos Medicine.
We are now reading Fantastic  Mr. Fox. We really
enjoy listening  to the adventures Mr. Fox and his family are
having. We don’t like Farmer Bunce, Farmer Boggis and Farmer Bean. Have you read Fantastic Mr. Fox or maybe The Twits?

In Level 2, students were asked to make playdough as one of their homework tasks.  We have used the playdough in many different ways including, making fractions in Mathematics, spelling words in Literacy and making models as part of our integrated unit on Mini-beasts.   Here are some pictures of our fantastic mini-beast models.  Can you guess what they are?

 On Wednesday 22 and Thursday 23 July, Level 2 participated in a very interesting incursion – “What’s Safe in My Garden?”  This incursion relates to our Term 3 Integrated Curriculum topic being “mini beats”. 

At the incursion the students looked at, touched and discussed facts about a variety of mini beasts including lizards, crickets, cockroaches, spiders, scorpions, and even a small crocodile! 

IThis week Level Two students had a Mini Beasts Incursion.  The children got to look at scorpions and spiders and even touch lizards, mule worms, cockroaches and Snappy the crocodile!  It was a very exciting learning experience!

In 1/PE this week we have been learning our ‘st’ words in Grade 1 and our ‘red’ words in Prep.  We practised our spelling words using magazine letters, stamps, stencils, letter stickers and coloured pens.  Have a look at our great work!

For the remaining weeks of Term 2 the Level 2 students will be taking part in ‘Folk Dancing’ as part of a finale to our integrated unit ‘The Good Old Days’.  During the first session Mrs. Hocking taught the children ‘The Shoemaker’ and ‘Jump, Jim, Joe’.  There was some great dancing and lots of fun was had by all!  Thanks Mrs. Hocking!

Last Tuesday, 26 May 2009, 2D participated in a special Numeracy lesson based on “Number”. This lesson was conducted, to support Level 2 and all of the other Levels within TVPS to continue to plan and deliver effective and interesting Numeracy lessons.

2D’s Numeracy lesson was video taped! Three teachers from local Manningham schools, along with Jade Butler, Jen Bowden, our student teacher Masheana Rahimi, and of course our very own Bev Martin, participated in the lesson.  At one point Mr Renshaw was also an observer! 

This week 1L students have been discovering the length of objects and different measuring tools.  The students have used icypole sticks, unifix, hands, feet and steps to measure objects and distances around the classroom.  They all had a turn of making their own rulers using different measuring tools.  We had an interesting discussion about the negative points to using tools such as hands and feet to measure distances. 

As part of our Integrated Curriculum  studies, the children in 2J have been learning what it was like in the olden days. Mrs Hocking brought her silver to school and set  the children to work using lots of “elbow grease” to remove all the tarnish. Before we began we wrote a procedure which we followed. All the children decided that it was really good fun cleaning silver. Some children even thought that it would be a great occupation!

On Thursday the 30th of April the Grade 1 children, Miss Mardjetko, Miss Lambert and ‘Mr. Psarakis’ (Ask Mrs. Psarakis about her costume), dressed up in their finest olden days clothing and went to visit ‘Yarrabee’ Yesterday’s World and olden days school and museum.  

We saw lots of household items from the past and spent some time in a 1900’s style classroom. We also played some outdoor games; including the egg and spoon race, the potato sack race and the pancake flipping race.  Here are some photos of the children dressed up in their olden clothes at ‘Yarrabee’ participating in the pancake flipping race and spending some time in the olden days classroom.  Fun was had by all!! 

During Week 1 of Term 2, our Level 2 students have been occupied with writing interesting journal entries, describing their wonderful Easters, and the other fun adventures they got up to. 

This Term, Level 2 are focusing on "Melbourne, Then and Now" for our Integrated Curriculum unit.  As a result, on Thursday 23 April 2009, Grade 2, dressed in olden day clothes, attended "Yesterday World" in Greenvale and learnt a great deal of interesting facts related to how life was in Victoria 100 years ago.  The attached photo depicts the Grade 2 students undertaking a lesson in an olden day school."  We all had a lot of fun and upon returning to TVPS we discussed what we learnt. 

This week 1L students are enjoying the Easter festivities at school!  On Monday, they participated in the Easter Bonnet Parade.  On Tuesday, they were revising their addition sums in their Easter Booklets!

2J have been learning lots about subtraction in our class this week. Some of our class members are really fast at automatic subtraction. We have been doing some simple subtraction with numbers under 10 and have played a “Space Invaders” game which needed us to answer quickly before we were zapped by another class member. We have also played a snap game with playing cards. Using cards under 10 and playing in pairs, we turn over a card each and the first person to call out the answer to the subtraction problem keeps the cards. The player with the most cards wins!

This week in 1/PE in reading groups the “Fish” group read a book called “A Present For Dad.”  The students then completed a book response.  The students were required to order the list of things Imran (the boy in the story) had written in order to prepare the new lawn for his Dad as his birthday gift.  Jennifer completed an excellent book response as shown here. 

The students in this class enjoy writing each day.
This is a shared piece of writing we did for picure
writing. We think it’s so interesting and funny, we should have it published. We also enjoy journal and genre writing. Our favorite style is narrative, where we make up our own story. Oh, and off course we enjoy creating

Every Monday morning immediately after assembly, the Level 2 students undertake a power walk through the local streets of Lower Templestowe with their teachers and various parents.

This year the Level 2 students will record the distance they walk each week and chart their progress on a large board displaying a map from Lower Templestowe to the city.  Our final destination is the Melbourne Cricket Ground.  When we do reach our destination we will celebrate this milestone by conducting a number of fun activities at school (towards the end of the year).

Our power walk helps to maintain the students’ level of physical activity and also teaches the students to understand how much we need to actually walk to reach a certain destination.

Students in Level Two are focusing on 'Ocean's Notions,' which is our integrated topic for the term.  Children in 1L discussed what is found in the ocean and then created a big mural of the sea using paint, sponges, glue, scissors and pencils.  1L students were very proud of their class creation!

Mrs Hocking and Mrs Marshall had a wonderful relaxing holiday. As part of their holiday they trained for the Mountain To Surf Run at Lorne that was held in January. The race was 8 km long. It started at the Police station, going up over the hills, through a river track, along  the Great Ocean Road and finishing  at the Lorne Surf Club. Although the teachers didn’t win they did personal bests and finished the race in under an hour!