Prep Term 4 Overviews

To all our wonderful Prep families,

Welcome to Term 4 and back to the classroom!

Reading  

In Reading, we are focusing on persuasive texts, comprehension strategies, summarising and critiquing books we read, inferring and making connections to different personal experiences or different texts. Students will continue to practise and develop their decoding strategies, monitoring their reading by asking ‘does that make sense?’ and re reading the text if it does not. Students will continue to share their thoughts about texts they read by identifying their favourite events, characters or new information they have learnt. When summarising fiction texts, students will summarise the characters, events, problem and solution in a story. When reading non-fiction texts students will summarise the important facts and ideas in their book.

Continuing our phonics work, students will be learning the digraphs ph and wh. They will also explore the long a sound (ai, ay), the long e sound (ee, ea, and y), the long i sound (ie, igh, and y), the long o sound (oa) and the suffix -ing. Students will use these digraphs when reading everyday texts and will continue to practise their DCC common words over the term. 

Writing

Throughout Term 4, we will continue to explore what makes a great writer by using 5 star writing and colourful semantics for sentence structure. Students will continue to develop their ideas into written texts, taking inspiration from persuasive topics. Students will organise their writing and use their author's voice to state their opinion on a given topic, followed by their reasoning. Students will continue to refine their spelling and use of punctuation. They will focus on adding capital letters to the beginning of sentences, full stops at the end of sentences and re-read their writing to ensure it makes sense. Students will apply their phonics knowledge by writing words that contain digraphs (ch, sh, th, ng, ck, wh) and some long vowel sounds. 

Numeracy

In Numeracy, we will build our understanding of the numbers to 20 through addition, subtraction and sharing. We will explore questions such as: “If I have 8 hot wheels and I buy 4 more, how many hot wheels will I have altogether?” and “If I have 15 apples and I eat 5, how many apples will I have left?” We will strengthen our understanding of addition, subtraction and sharing by using materials such as counters, unifix and our own drawings to help us solve worded problems. We will practise counting collections of objects using efficient organisation, collaboration and counting strategies. We will revisit early algebra by copying, continuing and creating our own repeating patterns. We will connect the days of the week to our daily lives, and we will begin to measure time by comparing how long something takes. Using concrete and familiar materials, we will compare mass (“Is the pencil heavier or lighter than the scissors?”), capacity (“Does the cup hold more or hold less than the bowl?”), and length (“Is my pinky finger longer or shorter than my thumb?”). We will develop our understanding of how money is used to buy things through play based learning experiences.

Inquiry 

In Inquiry, we will be exploring a science unit driven by the question “How do living things thrive?” We will tune into this topic by investigating the difference between living and non-living things and we will unpack the language of a “need” vs. a “want”. We will conduct experiments to determine what plants need to survive, and develop an understanding of indigenous plants in the Wyndham area. We will build on this local knowledge to learn about broader habitats, and the needs of the native animals within those habitats. Students will reflect on their ability to positively impact the environment and how sharing their knowledge with others can help plants and animals to thrive.  

Social and Emotional Learning

In Social and Emotional Learning we will build on the work we have done around emotions throughout the year as we begin to explore comfortable and uncomfortable feelings such as tired, frustrated, proud and excited. Through our Respectful Relationships program we will begin to explore the differences and similarities between boys and girls and develop the understanding that our gender doesn’t imply our interests or our favourite things. We will look at fair and friendly play and the role sharing has within this as well as how we keep our body safe. Students will work together to create common understandings of our DCC values of kindness, respect, teamwork, integrity and learning and apply these through a variety of activities throughout the term.

Discovery

This term we will continue to build oral language through Discovery Learning. This includes exploring new vocabulary and placing a deep focus on sentence structure. Students will discover through a range of play opportunities as they focus on sharing their experiences with others using correct sentence structure. Vocabulary will be selected from students' reflections to delve further into, we will explore the definition, connect with students' prior knowledge and identify what this sounds like within sentences depending on past, present or future tense.  

Goals and achievements

New goals and achievements will be updated on COMPASS in Weeks 5 and 10. Strategies you can implement at home will also be included, so that you can best support your child in their learning at both school and home. 

Kind Regards,

Prep Teachers