Semester 1, Week 3, Monday

Zakari
Practice time at swimming, Zak swam 8 laps of the 25m pool. He is so determined to learn butterfly that he even attempted 2 laps without having even been taught yet!

After lunch, he completed pages 90 (3-digit subtraction with trading) and 91 (Fractions of a collection) from Maths Plus 4 Stage 2. He tends to work well with subtraction, even to the point of completing them without showing any working! He also works well in fractions, for the most part, although he makes the occasional mistake, but it's not so much that he doesn't understand it, as that he is rushing to complete his work.

Kaliah
Today, Kaliah had a companion in her swimming lesson, which hopefully will encourage her to improve. She still struggles a bit with her kicking in freestyle and backstroke, but her overall performance in the water has improved.

After lunch, she worked from Targeting Maths Year 2, pages 6 (Estimation), 7 (Problem solving), 8 (Shapes and right angles) and 9 (Sides and corners). Whilst she is quite competent at estimating the number of objects in a group, she struggles to then circle groups of 10. We need to do alot of work on problem solving. Today's exercise showed $50 notes, $20 notes, $10 notes and $5 notes and asked to show as many answers as possible for which notes would make $100. Kaliah had difficulties in working out how many of the same notes would equal 100 (even when referring back to the hundreds chart), and did not even attempt to put different notes together. However, she competently worked through shapes and right angles, and easily recognises a right angle within a shape, and had no problems working out that most shapes have the same number of sides as they do corners.

Kaliah then chose to read Our Stripy Baby by Gillian Shields, writing a one and a half page summary of the book afterwards. I like to get her to write about the books she reads so that she gains an understanding of what she has read and also to practice her handwriting and spelling. From today's effort, all of these things need to be worked on and improved.

Khaemon
Khaemon is getting alot of individual attention in swimming - the joys of being the only class member! Steph was working on his freestyle stroke and breathing, his backstroke, and his ability to dive under water to retrieve objects from the bottom of the pool.

He worked from My First Maths Book, pages 8 (Order and Colour) and 9 (Count and Colour). Khaemon is starting to associate colours with their words - I was showing him how the first object in group needed to be red, the second, blue .... and then he told me the third, fourth and fifth colours! And then he successfully coloured the three groups of objects on the page. On the next page, we counted groups of objects (eg. how many dogs, how many cats, etc) and then coloured each group in a different colour as we counted.

Veygas
Veygas was one of four in his swimming lesson today, and in true Vevo style, was as cheeky as ever. Kate has taken to putting a back bubble on him when he is sitting on the side, as he has a tendency to slide in the water and play around instead of waiting his turn. He is not too fond of floating on his back, but will usually kick when instructed. Kate worked with him alone a little at the end of the lesson, getting him ready for learning to dive.

Saffryn
She is becoming alot more confident in the water, kicking her legs and splashing her arms, even if it is mostly involuntary excited splashing at this point in time ... I am hoping that by the time she is required to be paddling and kicking that this splashing has been good practice for her! With a relief instructor today, our lesson was a bit different, and we even used arm floaties and back bubbles (which Saff wasn't too sure about). At least she is not resisting being in the water anymore.