Preps

While we are coming to the end of the first semester together, this is a chance to celebrate the amazing learning that your children have been doing. Both Andrew and I are blown away by how far they have all come and continue to impress us every day. With so many light-bulb moments and their brains acting like sponges, you should be so proud of how far they have come. This week we started a new activity involving all the difference literacy elements: Reading, Writing and phonics. Students first designed their own headband using the characters they have been introduced through reading their Decodable Readers. This was an activity that they completed with their buddies last week. In pairs, both classes got together to decode their partner’s sentence attached to their headbands, while their partner had to write it on mini whiteboards. This is a great activity that you might even want to try at home. Here are the steps to get you started.1. Allocate who goes first with writing. One person is the writer and the other is the reader. 2. The reader reads the sentence (that is on their buddy’s head) to their buddy. They can read it lots of times. 3. The writer listens carefully, sounds out the words, and writes it down. 4. When the writer has finished recording the sentence, the writer can take off the headband and use the sentence to tick and fix their work. Both buddies work together to do this checking. 5. Swap roles. The writer becomes the reader and now the reader has to write the sentence.

In Maths we have been completing some Department provided lessons around addition and subtraction. These lessons have introduced the students to words such as part and whole as well as maths operations like number bonds. The students have loved completing and I use a direct quote ‘big kid hard maths’

We want to finish by thanking all the students and families for making the first two terms at school an absolute pleasure.