Last Friday, the students in the Year 5 Learning Community led our school in whole school prayer. The prayer was centred around the beginning of the liturgical season of Lent. 

Lent is the period of 40 days which comes before Easter in the Christian calendar. Beginning on Ash Wednesday, Lent is a season of reflection and preparation before the celebrations of Easter. By observing the 40 days of Lent, Christians replicate Jesus Christ's sacrifice and withdrawal into the desert for 40 days. 

After recess we often get a glitter jar each and find a spot by ourselves to take some deep breaths. This helps to calm our minds and bodies after a busy play outside. We shake the glitter and then watch it all fall to the bottom while we breathe in through our nose and out through our mouth. You can instantly feel a change of energy within the classroom after we do this. Mindfulness is an important part of our day! 

We are learning to write persuasively. The art of persuasion can take on several different forms. We can persuade to influence others, to promote or to sell, to sway an audience and so on. Last week a hypothetical scenario was presented to students that provoked passion & opinion. We discussed what it meant to be 'open to other perspectives’ and the importance of establishing a well rounded point of view and shared our writing through a collaborative feedback process. 

Our investigations have been looking at identity and families. Part of our learning involved participating in a focus group where children drew and discussed who was in their family and what they like to do together.

We have been discussing the importance of fine motor skills. Not only are they important for handwriting and cutting, but some jobs rely on having really strong fine motor skills e.g. a surgeon. In this task, we had to cut out shapes and glue them on a piece of paper. We will do the same task next term to see if we have improved with our cutting!

Our investigations have involved brainstorming appropriate questions that could be asked by doctors and patients in a clinic. We put our ideas into speech bubbles and spoke about important punctuation, such as question marks. 

On Tuesday, JLC began coding using the web based program, Scratch.

We learnt how to select a backdrop, choose a sprite and code it so that it moved around the screen when the arrow keys were pressed.

Here's the link to Scratch if you'd like to explore coding at home.

https://scratch.mit.edu/ 

Meet Alipius, also known as Ali. 

Ali is a representation of all students in our St Alipius Year 6 Leadership Team. 

Ali is surrounded by the words and phrases that describe our current understanding of effective learning - our understanding of what an effective learner is and what an effective learner does. 

We look forward to evolving our understanding of learning throughout the year.

Parents are invited to complete the following survey - see VL feature above for more information.

https://forms.gle/VERDMzsvThEbgeLH7 

St Alipius is committed to providing a safe and supportive environment for people of all ages, with special concern for children. Child safety policy and practices support a proactive role in the care, wellbeing and protection of children and the provision of child safe environments. This video was made with the intention of providing a clear and accessible version of this policy for our students and community to access. We encourage you to share this video with your children at home to begin or continue conversations around child safety.