Prep

Dear Prep families,

Welcome back to Term Three. We hope that you enjoyed the term break and were able to spend some quality time with your families.

We have jumped STRAIGHT into our learning this term, despite the cold weather, and we are so proud of the energy and enthusiasm our Prep students have brought back to school with them. We have a busy term coming up – especially with our 100 Days of School on the way (scheduled for Friday 28 July), and lots of great learning opportunities to come throughout the term, such as our Science week, Book week, a Zoo excursion and swimming later in the term. Stay tuned for more information in regard to our 100 Days of Prep celebration, sent via XUNO email.

Dreamer and the Rainbow Tiger Incursion

During week one, Prep students participated in the Dreamer and the Rainbow Tiger Incursion at school. This incursion supported students’ understanding of our current unit of inquiry of 'How We Express Ourselves'. Our Central Idea is 'Managing emotions can help us understand ourselves and others' and it provided students with an opportunity to dive deeper into the lines of inquiry. Students had a beautiful experience and were engaged by the wondrous show and amazing puppet characters. Even the adults absolutely loved it!

Reading

In Reading, the preps have continued exploring different text types (fiction and non-fiction texts) and identifying the important features of these text types. We are using the Good Reader strategies to help decode unfamiliar words and ensuring we try to integrate more than one strategy when attempting an unknown word.

Our focus on comprehension has led us to investigating Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self and Text -to-World connections, encouraging students to relate the text to another text, back to themselves and to our world.

Text-to-Text: How do the ideas in this text remind you of another text (story, book, movie, song, etc)?
Text-to-Self: How do the ideas in this text relate to your own life, ideas, and experiences?
Text-to-World: How do the ideas in this text reading relate to the larger world—past, present and future.

Writing

In writing, students have continued exploring the five W’s (who, what, when, where & why) in lessons and completed a drawing and writing task describing what they did on their term break and on the weekend. Students continue to have a go at writing sentences correctly, starting with a capital letter, maintaining finger spaces between words, and using different punctuation such as a question mark, full stops, and exclamation mark - to finish of their sentences. Students are encouraged to write sentences to express and manage their emotions. For example, sometimes we feel like throwing a tantrum, but we don’t. Sometimes we feel like hitting someone, but we don’t. These are times we are controlling and regulating our feelings.

Mathematics

In Mathematics, we have continued exploring the concept of addition within Number and Algebra. The students have demonstrated open-mindedness when exploring open-ended problems. It has been wonderful to see students recognise the plus (+) sign and the equal (=) sign, and confidently using counting on, a number line and part/part/whole strategies when solving addition problems. It is great to see students using different mathematical vocabularies such as: plus, sum, add, and, makes when combining collections.

Reminders for Term Three:

100 days of School will be in Week 3, on Friday 28 of July. Students may dress up on that day, and it will be a whole day celebration just for prep.
Science Week will be celebrated in week 6 (14th – 18th August).
Prep swimming is scheduled in the last two weeks of term three, from Tuesday 5th - Thursday 14th September.
Students are expected to bring their blue satchel to school EVERY DAY, as well as their iPads fully charged and a pair of headphones.
Please pack a change of underwear, socks and shorts/pants in case your child has a toileting accident. These items should be stored in your child’s bad and clearly labelled.
A reminder about Waste Free Wednesdays where students are encouraged to bring foods with no packaging within their lunch box.

We look forward to another exciting term with your children. Please check the 'Important Dates' tab for more dates.

Kind regards,

The Prep teaching team