Foundation

Foundation Term 3 - August Newsletter 2024

Literacy

In Literacy, students are developing reading fluency using our Little Learners Love Literacy texts. We are explicitly instructing students to point to each word while reading to ensure proper directionality. Emphasising the skills of segmenting and blending words is also a key focus when engaging with these texts. Additionally, our heart words remain a priority, and we have progressed to Stage 4 Heart Words.

We continue to use Story Champs to identify and retell the main parts of a story. Students identify the characters, problem, feelings, actions, and ending. This understanding is then applied to their writing, where they concentrate on forming simple sentences. Students are explicitly taught to focus on recording the correct beginning, middle, and end sounds in each word as well as writing their Heart Words correctly.

Students are transferring their knowledge from Story Champs to write sentences from our Pip and Tim books by identifying the character and action. They have been practising writing sentences that include ‘who’ and ‘what they are doing’, while remembering that in our sentences we need to start with a capital letter, have spaces between each word and end in a full stop. 

Knowledge

We are continuing learning about the Olympics. Students have been engaged in learning about all the different sports involved in the Olympics. We continue to reflect on the Olympic values and how these are very similar to our values at Gilgai Plains. Students have also enjoyed watching some competitions during eating times and shown interest in their favourite Olympic sports. 

We have begun our new Knowledge Unit with a Geography focus called 'Let's Explore Our World’. Students have been learning about what a country and state is and were able to identify the Australian states and territories on a map. We will be exploring the 7 continents throughout the term.

Mathematics

 In Maths, students are being taught how to add numbers up to 20. They have been practising with the count all method, where they use objects to put two numbers together and count them all. Furthermore, students are learning to add using the counting on method, starting from the bigger number and adding the second one. This method helps solve addition problems faster, especially when the numbers are larger than 10. 

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)

During Social and Emotional Learning we engaged in a gratitude lesson to recognise new friendships and why we should be grateful for them. Students reflected and understood how they are grateful for new friends through actions and words. It was very insightful to see how students describe why they are grateful for their friends. Some responses were ‘because my friend is kind, because my friend helps me, because my friend plays with me or because my friend shares toys with me’.

AUSLAN

Students have been engaged in learning about Zoo Animals. They are able to identify their favourite zoo animal by signing in AUSLAN. Signs taught were who, what, when, where, why, how, because, how many, how much, how old, want, don’t want, question, ask.