I am continuously amazed by the wonderful lessons our Barbreck staff create. This week I visited a number of classes and saw the girls thoroughly engaged in their lessons.

In Year 4T STEM, the girls were designing a Kahoot! for the Year 2 class that had been learning about coral reefs. Kahoot! is a game-based learning platform, used as educational technology in schools and other educational institutions. “Kahoots” are user-generated multiple-choice quizzes that can be accessed via a web browser or the Kahoot App. When the player reads a question, they can tap on a true/false or yes/no button to answer the question and it will tell them if they got it right or not!

The Year 4 girls were watching the Magic School Bus – Coral Reefs in order create the questions they would be asking. I look forward to playing these Kahoots!

In my observation of the Year 5FW, the girls were engaged in an activity titled ‘Greedy Pig’. This game involved the girls applying a range of Addition strategies. Some of the ‘quick-maths’ strategies were designed to enable interactive and fun learning activities. 

• If adding a number close to a 10 number e.g. adding 38. The girls could add 40 and then subtract 2.
• They could add the tens on and then split the single digit to what makes 10 and add the rest e.g. 55 + 28 = 55 + 20 + 5 + 3.
• They could add all tens together and then the ones e.g. 55 + 38 = 50 + 30 + 5 + 8
• Miss Wardlaw operated the digital spinning wheel of numbers from 1 – 50 and after each spin the girls had to add the chosen number. It was a race to 1000!

I also enjoyed spending time with the girls in Year 2W who are working on improving their reading fluency as well as by applying these skills in the form of short plays. During the past few weeks they have been preparing mini-plays such as ‘The Paper Bag Princess’ and ‘The Lion Trainer’, and the girls will complete this exercise with a puppet theatre performance of both plays.

Finally, my visit to the Year 1T Teams lessons, the girls were reading the book ‘Who Sank the Boat?’ The girls had to discover which animal they thought sank the boat. Many theories were discussed and many animals were blamed but at the end of the discussion they concluded that they were all to blame as the boat had reached beyond its full capacity. The lesson concluded with the girls using the coloured clay provided by Miss Taylor to make both a small capacity boat and a large capacity boat.  So many concepts, skills and thinking strategies were applied in this lesson!

Our girls are certainly enjoying a range of wonderful lessons. Thank you goes to our teachers for continually coming up with these great lessons!