What's Happening in the Junior School

 Prep

What’s Happening in Prep in July

Welcome back to school! The Prep team hope you and your family had a wonderful and restful holiday. It has been lovely hearing about all the Prep’s exciting adventures over the break. Term 3 is shaping up to be a busy yet fun term of learning and events. We are very excited to be celebrating our 100 Days of School in Week 3. Please take note of the many important dates below. There will be more information regarding each of these events sent out via Compass over the coming weeks.  

Wellbeing 

• NAIDOC week  
• Persistence and Growth Mindset  

•  Zones of regulation  

   

Literacy 

• Practising CVC, CCVC, CVCC words 
• Understanding when to double f, l, s or z in words (floss rule) 
• Understanding when to use ck to represent /k/ (long spelling after a short vowel sound) 
• Identifying the diagraph /sh/ ship 
• Identifying the diagraph th (/th/ this [voiced] and /th/ thumb [unvoiced]) 
• Identifying the diagraph ch - /ch/ charlie  
• Identifying the diagraph /ph/ phone 
• Identifying the diagraph /wh/ wheel 
• Identifying the diagraph /ng/ sing 
• Using dotted thirds to form letters correctly 
• Identifying the difference between fiction and non-fiction 

• Writing a sentence to inform

   

Maths 

• Counting pictorial addition number stories up to 10 
• Making stories for pictorial addition number stories up to 10 
• Representing addition number stories on a ten-frame 
• Counting pictorial subtraction number stories up to 10 
• Representing take away number stories within 10 with materials 
• Making stories for pictorial subtraction stories within 10 
• Representing take away number stories within 10 with ten-frames 
• Counting to identify the difference within 10 
• Using a number track to find the difference within 10 
• Counting the total on a number track within 10 
• Subtracting numbers within 10 on a number track.  

Knowledge Unit 

Focus: Science 

Big question: How do living things grow and change? 

• What is a living thing?  
• What do living things need to survive?  
• What are some features of animals and plants? 

Specialist 

Please find below a timetable of when your child/rens class will attend specialist.  

Homework 

Each week, your child/ren will bring home a blue reading pouch (satchel). Inside, you will find; 

• Three decodable readers 
• One picture storybook labelled Classroom Library.  
• A green “Decoding Detective/ Word Wizard” workbook 
• Sound pack cards.  

These resources are designed to support your child’s reading practice at home. Please keep all reading materials stored in the reading pouch. Reading pouches should be returned to school each Friday so students can swap their books for the following week, and additional learning materials can be added. Please note that at this early stage of the year, students are not expected to independently decode every word in their reading texts. At this point, they may focus on identifying individual sounds and recognising the “heart words” that have been explicitly taught in class (you can find these words within the Word Wizard section of the green workbook) Thank you for supporting your child’s reading journey at home! 

Reminders 

• Monday 27th & Tuesday 28th July - Parent Teacher Interviews 
• Wednesday 29th July - 100 Days of School   
• Friday 31st July – Open Afternoon 
• Thursday 13th August - Moonlit Sanctuary Excursion 

Year 1

What’s Happening in Year 1 in July 

Welcome back to Term 3! We are looking forward to a great term of learning in Wellbeing. In the month of July, students will begin to explore different types of self-regulating tools – sensory supports, tools for calming and thinking tools.  Students will identify that tools will be individualized and different strategies will work for different situations and feelings. Over the term, students will practice using the tools when they are in a regulated state so they become routine and automatic when they need to use them in a dysregulated state. 

Literacy 

The Year 1 students will be working through the UFLI structured, synthetic phonics program. During this time, they will focus on developing their phonics knowledge, decoding skills, and confidence as early readers. Last month, the focus has been on the superhero e spelling pattern which signals that the short vowel sound changes to a long vowel sound for example cub to cube or hop to hope. During the month of July, children will engage enthusiastically with new sounds and patterns including two syllable words with open and closed syllable patterns and the spelling graphemes – tch and dge which are used to spell the /ch/ and /j/ sound after a short vowel sound. They will begin applying these skills to their reading and writing. We will continue with our fluency reading, focusing on reading with accuracy, reading rates, and using expression when reading. Students continue working on practising our short letters in handwriting, focusing on correctly forming the letters u and v in both uppercase and lowercase. 

Language and Literature 

Our first mentor text for Term 3 will be The Boy Who Tried to Shrink His Name by Sandhya Parappukkaran. 

Students will use the text to: 

• Identify and sequence key events in the narrative.  
• Develop their understanding of how connectives can be used to organise ideas clearly in writing and use the time connectives first, next, after that, and finally, in their own work.  
• Explore how to write simple sentences and extend them by adding prepositional phrases that provide information about where and when events occur.  
• Explore both the literal and inferred meanings within the story. 
• Develop an understanding of how the illustrations contribute to the overall meaning of the text. 
• Explore the characters in the story and consider their different perspectives.  

• Discuss the importance of names and how they contribute to our sense of identity and belonging. 

   

Our grammar focus will be identifying and defining adverbs of time and place. E.g. Yesterday we visited Grandma. Sam kicked the ball over there. 

Maths 

In Mathematics, students have been continuing to develop their fluency skills within our Number Fluency Program (NFP). They have been progressing through a variety of skill sets, guided by a weekly teacher 'skill check' assessment. We have also been investigating alternating and repeating patterns and have begun skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s. Additionally, students have begun exploring early concepts of division via sharing and grouping. They have been solving problems by sharing quantities equally into groups, finding half of a collection and by sharing collections into arrays. They have also been identifying the number of groups and skip counting to make groups.  

Knowledge Unit 

This term in Knowledge unit we will be starting a new topic of chemical science (materials and changes). In this unit, students learn that everyday materials can be physically changed in a variety of ways. They will conduct investigations with different objects, including everyday materials. Predictions and comparisons will be made about how the shapes of objects made from different materials can be physically changed through actions such as bending, stretching and twisting. Students will also explore how materials change when heated or cooled.   

Specialist Timetables 

1BM:  

• Tuesday: Performing Arts and Japanese 
• Wednesday: PE and Art 

1C: 

• Tuesday: Performing Arts and Japanese 
• Wednesday: PE and Art 

1M: 

• Monday: Performing Arts 
• Tuesday: PE and Art 
• Wednesday: Japanese 

1MC: 

• Monday: Performing Arts 
• Tuesday: PE and Art 
• Wednesday: Japanese 

Reminders: 

Fruit Snack 

Every morning at 9.55am students will have a fruit snack. You child must have their fruit/veggie snack in a separate smaller container to their lunch. 

Take Home Reading 

Please make sure you child brings their reading pouch with their three readers on Thursdays. Students should be reading every night for 15-20 minutes. It is important for students to read their take home readers multiple times to build fluency. Students will also take home a book from the classroom library. This will be a rich literature text and can be read by you to your child.  

Science materials

For an upcoming science experiment this term we are looking for donations of any empty small plastic soft drink or water bottles (under 600 mL). Please ensure they are clean and dry with labels removed. If you have any bottles at home, please send them into school.

Year 2

What’s Happening in Year 2 in July

Welcome to Term 3! We hope everyone enjoyed their break. We have enjoyed kicking off the term by celebrating NAIDOC Week and creating a ‘deadly door’ display to celebrate ‘50 Years of Deadly’. Last term the students wrote their own Acknowledgements of Country and we have begun using them at staff meetings and assembly. Last week we also began our Science unit on plants and we are getting excited to do some planting soon! 

Over the next month, the Year 2 students will be learning to: 

Wellbeing 

• Identify ways we can show respect 
• Exploring how we can show respect and value to differences 
• Identify positive coping strategies 

• Identify ways we can manage anger 

   

Phonics 

• Review previously taught graphemes 

• Read and write words with suffix and prefixes: s & -es, -er/-est, -ly, -less &  -ful 

   

Literacy 

• Identify and discuss the story map for our mentor text ‘Jetty Jumping’ 
• Read background knowledge by reading texts and identifying new vocabulary 
• Identify the structure of a persuasive text 
• Write persuasive sentences using modal verbs and conjunctions to justify. 
• Write a persuasive text. 

• Write sentences with pronouns to replace nouns

   

Maths 

• Doubling and writing addition equations 
• Doubling and skip counting 
• Halving numbers and writing the subtraction equation 
• Making arrays of 2s, 5s and 10s and writing repeated addition 
• Using bar models to represent 'groups of' 
• Using mathematical modelling for multiplicative problems 
• Identifying the difference between sharing and grouping 
• Representing sharing and grouping with arrays 
• Modelling sharing and grouping with remainders 
• Solving division problems using equal grouping and partitioning 

Knowledge Unit 

This term, the Year 2 students are studying Biological Science. We are exploring the Big Question:  

What do plants need to grow and thrive? 

This month we will be:  

• Identifying the features of living things.  
• Identifying plants as living things. 
• Identifying the external features of plants and grouping plants by features. 

• Identifying the basic needs of plants and how an environment meets plant needs

   

Homework  

Your child will continue to swap their take-home books each Thursday. They will bring home three decodable texts. We strongly encourage students to reread these texts multiple times across the week as this is an important way novice readers develop automaticity and reading fluency.  

Students will also continue to bring home a classroom library textthat can be shared together.

Reminders: 

• Parent Teacher Interviews: Week 3 
• Open Afternoon: Friday 31st July 
• Year 2 Mad About Science ‘Plant Power’ Incursion: Thursday 20th of August