Foundation: Connect

Foundation

Students have done an amazing job of coming into their classrooms independently. They are so proud of themselves and feeling super confident. Thank-you for your support with this. We had our first Kitchen class which was very exciting! Thanks to all the parent helpers who supported us for our very first session.

We are so pleased that students are loving their take-home readers and fluency sheets. They are buzzing with excitement about learning to read! We appreciate you ensuring they read nightly at home, consolidating the learning that is occurring at school.

Literacy

Students have learnt b, l, f, h and u over the past two weeks. They are practising these sounds and are particularly focusing on letter formation when writing. Students are creating words using these new sounds and also have been interested in rhyming words such as 'bat, hat, and pat'. They understand that the first sound is changing in rhyming words but the middle and the end sound is the same. They are also really trying hard to use their 'phoneme fist' (sounds fist) when sounding out words. This helps them to isolate the letters into sound groups as they put one finger up for every sound said. 

During writing sessions students have continued to learn about nouns. They know that a noun can be a; person, place, thing or animal and have explored this through the Gruffalo text and activities. In sentences students are identifying and naming what the noun (eg. a rabbit, man, girl) is and what they are doing (the verb). For example, 'The girl is walking' - girl is the noun and walking is the verb. Additionally, they are understanding the sequence of a story and how to retell events, verbally and pictorially. We enjoyed the story 'This Moose belongs to Me'.

Heart Words: 

Heart Words are common words that cannot be sounded out easily and appear frequently in many texts. We teach students that these are words they need to remember “by heart.” To support this, we practise saying the letter names (not the sounds) and then reading the whole word together. A heart is placed on the “tricky” part of the word to help students notice and remember it.

We have learnt the heart words; 'the, to' and 'was'. The word 'and' is also being learnt but it is NOT a heart word as the whole word is decodable. 

Maths

In Maths, students have been exploring the use of five and tens frames. It is important that students see numbers built and connect the quantity to the numeral. One-to-one correspondence is important when counting. Additionally, students are learning that the same number can look differently depending on how it has pictorially been represented. 

They have enjoyed our fluency exercises of rolling a dice and writing the number quickly. Students are building up their capacity to instantly recognise the dots on a dice to become fluent and accurate at this exercise. 

Our Maths sessions continue to be very hands-on, and manipulatives are imperative. Their favourite has been using our teddy trains which can fit 10 plastic teddies in it - mirroring a tens frame. This organisation or manipulatives helps the counting process. 

Kind regards,

Alex Whittle (0A) and Kate Clark (0B)

Foundation Team