Prep/1 News

Welcome back to Term 3! We hope all our families enjoyed a relaxing and refreshing school holiday break. We have an exciting term ahead, filled with engaging learning experiences across all areas of the curriculum. Students can look forward to celebrating 100 Days of School, Book Week, swimming lessons and Father's Day activities, along with many other wonderful opportunities to learn, grow and have fun. We are excited to see the progress our students will make throughout the term and look forward to another fantastic term of learning together.

English:Text Focus - A Year on our Farm

This term, students are enjoying the text 'A Year on Our Farm' by Penny Matthews. Through this engaging story, students are developing their reading comprehension, vocabulary and writing skills while exploring how the changing seasons affect life on an Australian farm. They will make predictions, retell events, describe characters and settings, and create a range of written responses inspired by the text.

Students will learn to:

• identify and discuss the characters, setting and events in the story
• make predictions, ask questions and infer meaning from the text and illustrations
• sequence events and retell the story
• build vocabulary related to farms, weather and the seasons
• identify the author's message and make personal connections to the text
• use capital letters, full stops and appropriate spacing in their writing
• share and justify their ideas through class discussions.

Students will also investigate how daily and seasonal changes in the environment affect plants, animals and people. They will explore changes in weather, daylight and the four seasons, making strong links between the story and the world around them.

This unit provides rich opportunities for students to strengthen their literacy skills while developing an understanding of the natural environment and the changing seasons.

Here are some of our 4 seasons illustrations to represent the events that take place in the story:

Science: Earth and Space Sciences - Weather

In our Science lessons, students have been exploring how changes in the sky and environment, such as different types of weather, day and night, and the four seasons, affect our everyday lives. As part of our learning, students identified and drew a range of weather symbols and enjoyed discussing different kinds of weather and how they influence the activities we do each day. Here are our weather symbols:

Play-based Learning

Our students have thoroughly enjoyed our play-based learning sessions, which have been linked to our classroom learning about farms. They have explored a farmers' market in the home corner, designed and built their own farmyards using blocks and farm animals, and strengthened their literacy skills by drawing and writing about life on the farm. These hands-on experiences have encouraged creativity, collaboration and meaningful connections to our learning.