Reading

Our Prep students have been very busy developing their reading skills through our daily InitiaLit lessons. It has been fantastic to see their confidence continue to grow as they learn new sounds and apply their knowledge when reading and writing words and sentences. Over the past few weeks, students have explored a range of new sounds and digraphs, including ‘sh’, ‘qu’ and ‘ee’. Students have been learning to recognise these letter combinations, identify the sounds they make and understand where these sounds can be heard within words.

During our lessons, students have been strengthening their blending and segmenting skills. They have been practising putting sounds together to read words and breaking words apart into their individual sounds to support spelling. Students have also been using sound boxes, letter tiles, word-building activities and handwriting practice to consolidate their learning.We have also continued to focus on developing reading fluency and accuracy. Students are practising reading words and sentences independently and during small-group reading sessions. They have been encouraged to look carefully at each sound, blend through the whole word and reread sentences to develop confidence and fluency.

Our Prep students have also added lots of new tricky words to their growing word bank! Recently, we have been learning all, call, ball, tall, little, go, so, no, this and then. Students are practising recognising these words automatically and using them when reading and writing sentences. We are incredibly proud of the progress our Prep students are making. Their growing confidence, persistence and enthusiasm towards reading have been wonderful to see. Keep up the fantastic work, Preps!

Writing

This week in Writing, we have been continuing to develop our letter formation skills. We played Letter Detectives, where students looked closely at letters with incorrect formation and explained what was wrong before showing the class how the letter should be formed correctly. We also went on a classroom hunt to find matching lowercase and capital letters that are formed differently. Students then practised writing these letters on their sky, grass and dirt whiteboards, followed by rotations with a range of activities to further consolidate correct letter formation.

We have also been practising writing CVC and CVCC words. We warmed up by looking at simple pictures drawn on the whiteboard, such as a sun, dog or bed, and writing the matching word. Students then completed our weekly PowerPoint activity, where they looked at pictures and wrote the matching CVC and CVCC words, including words containing the digraphs we have been learning. This was followed by rotations where students had opportunities to practise writing and spelling words in a variety of fun and engaging ways.

For sentence writing, we took our learning outside into the playground and used our imaginations to pretend we were camping! Students thought about what they might see, hear and smell while camping and added their ideas to our splash sheet of words. It was lots of fun and gave us plenty of interesting words to use when constructing sentences. We have now begun working with a new beach picture, where we have started collecting words by labelling the picture, beginning with the ‘who’. We look forward to using our collected words to help us build sentences about the beach.

Our Preps are making wonderful progress each week, and we couldn’t be prouder of how far they have already come!

Maths

Over the past two weeks, Prep students have begun learning about measurement. We started by exploring height and length. Students were able to identify objects that are tall or short, and long or short. They then compared different items by noticing which was longer or shorter, using careful language to describe what they could see as well as ensuring they lined the objects up correctly. Students also practised ordering a range of objects based on their height or length, demonstrating that measurement can be used to sort and compare in everyday contexts.

Next, we moved on to mass. Students learned that mass is about how heavy something is. They also discovered that size does not always mean weight. Something can be bigger but not necessarily heavier. For example, a brick is heavier than a teddy bear even if the teddy bear looks bigger. To strengthen this understanding, students used “hefting” to compare the mass of two objects. They placed one object in each hand, felt the difference in weight, and decided which one was heavier or lighter. Students enjoyed using a range of materials to support hands-on learning, helping them feel, compare, and explain their ideas with confidence.

We are proud of all of the students' efforts in understanding measurement!

SEL and other

In Respectful Relationships, we continued our unit on seeking help. We explored what it means to be helpful to our classmates and consolidated our learning through a fun game that encouraged teamwork and communication. We also discussed the different people at school who are there to help us and the reasons why we might need their help. For example, we talked about who we could go to if we forgot our lunch, or where we could go if we fell over and hurt ourselves during recess or lunchtime. We also discussed how our friends can be an important source of help and support.

In Geography, we continued exploring what makes a place special and why we go to certain places. We discussed how some places are visited for a particular purpose, such as going to the dentist to have our teeth checked and cleaned, but that this does not necessarily make the place special to us. We compared this with places that hold special meaning, such as visiting our grandparents and spending the afternoon playing games together. We consolidated our learning with a fun whole-class game where students were given different places and had to decide whether they were ‘special’ or ‘not special’. The challenge was not only choosing a side but also explaining why they thought the place was special or not special.

Swimming Week

What a fantastic Swimming Week our Prep students had! We are incredibly proud of the way our students approached each day with enthusiasm, bravery and a willingness to have a go.

Throughout the week, students developed important water safety and swimming skills while building their confidence in the pool. It was wonderful to see them listening carefully to their instructors, trying new skills and becoming more independent each day.

Swimming Week was also a great opportunity for students to demonstrate our school values. They showed Daring by challenging themselves and trying new things, Respect by listening to their instructors, and United by encouraging and supporting their classmates.

A huge congratulations to all of our Prep students for their fantastic efforts throughout the week. We are so proud of how far they came in just five days!

We would also like to thank all of our families for your support in helping students arrive prepared each day. We hope the students enjoyed Swimming Week as much as we enjoyed watching their confidence grow!

Wellbeing