Hawkesbury SoLaR Battalion Update
Miss Diener and I have been to 2 training days since the start of the term. These days have been a great opportunity to collaborate and share best teaching practice. One of the teaching strategies we learned was FDL Lessons (Fluency Development Lessons). This is a teaching routine that develops reading knowledge for students, who can already decode words. This program has already been implemented in C3 and I want to say a big thank you to Miss Diener and Mrs Huckel for setting this up so quickly. I know the students will benefit from the explicit teaching of prosody (reading with expression), vocabulary, phrasing, rhythm and more that comes with these lessons
Dance Group
Earlier this week some of our Year 6 girls wrote a persuasive piece of writing to me to convince me to continue to run dance group. This came in light of the news about Mrs Huckel moving to Queensland and not being able to run dance group from Term 2 onward. The Year 6 girls have even offered to run dance group for the school so this opportunity can continue to be provided for students. So the good news is that dance group will continue which, I know, students that are part of dance group will appreciate.
The Resilience Project: Gratitude
Working on gratitude helps us to be thankful and appreciate what we have in our lives, rather than focusing on what we don’t have or what we want. When we practice being grateful, we start to scan the world to look for positives – this only takes 21 days! Practicing gratitude every day increases our levels of energy, and help us to feel happier and more focused, determined and optimistic. It even helps us have better sleep, lowers levels of anxiety and depression and we are less likely to get sick. So many benefits – let’s all try to be grateful for the things and people in our lives every day!
Whole Family Activity:
Gratitude Scavenger Hunt
As a family create a scavenger hunt list of things that make you happy or you are grateful for, you can make your own list or use the examples below:
Each member of the family uses the list and has to find as many things as they can.
You can hunt for things inside or outside, or both. You can hunt for real things, or you can also do this using magazines or pictures from the internet.
After a set amount of time hunting, come back together, have a look at what each person collected and let them explain why they are grateful for each item.
Family Habit Builder:
Every night at dinner, have each person talk about their favourite thing about that day.
