Foundation: Connect

Term 1 2025

Reminder: Hats for recess and lunch times in Term 1 (it is best for them to stay in the student's locker for the term)

SEPS Family Welcome Picnic - today! Friday 21st February 2025 4.30PM-6PM

Please make sure hats, jumpers, water bottles and lunch bottles are clearly labelled

A very important note for parents/guardians regarding pick up: Please be aware that students will be dismissed from different classrooms on Friday afternoons (even weeks) from Week 4 as we have Communities on these afternoons. Before this begins, we strongly suggest you establish a meeting point with your child for when this occurs.

Welcome!

Dear Foundation Families,

With 14 whole days of school under their belt, our Foundation students are growing more confident each day! It’s wonderful to see so many children walking in independently with big smiles, unpacking their bags, and getting ready for a great day of learning. Their enthusiasm and resilience are shining through as they settle into routines and build new friendships.

Week Four has flown by, and we are so proud of how well our students are adjusting. We’re also looking forward to seeing many of you this afternoon at the Welcome Picnic —a great chance to connect, celebrate, and enjoy our school community together!

The Resilience Project

Each Monday following assembly, we have a session for The Resilience Project. This week students looked at emotions being the clues from our bodies about how we feel. They are normal and part of everyday life, they are neither good nor bad, they are just a source of information! Emotions are messengers that tell us something important and that we need to pay attention to it!

These students had a go at drawing different emotions and what their face may look like when they are feeling them!

Emotions

Name 3 emotions you experienced this week.

Learning

During our Literacy sessions, we’ve introduced the letters s, a, t, p, i and n. We are starting to learn to decode words by sounding the sounds out and then blending the sounds together to form the whole word. Students should celebrate their successes in reading words already! Amazing! We also have learnt the heart word 'the' and 'to'. Heart words are common words that are used frequently and contain a part that is difficult to spell (the heart goes over the tricky sound part). Students say the letter names out loud when writing a heart word to help consolidate the word to memory.

We are learning how to construct oral sentences ensuring we have included the 'what' and the 'who' in our sentence to be a proper full sentence. For example, in the sentence 'the dog is barking' students can identify the dog is the 'who' and barking is the 'what'.

Our Foundation students have been developing their counting skills, focusing on 1-1 correspondence—counting objects while saying each number aloud. This is a more advanced skill than rote counting, and we provide plenty of opportunities for practice using hands-on materials such as Unifix blocks, counters, and icy pole sticks. These tools help students build confidence and a strong foundation in numeracy.

We have also been learning about the months of the year and creating class birthday graphs. This engaging activity allows students to collect and analyse data, identifying which months have the most, least, or the same number of birthdays.

To reinforce learning, each lesson begins with a 10-minute review of the previous week’s work. This regular revision strengthens understanding and helps embed key mathematical concepts. We are so proud of our students’ enthusiasm and progress in numeracy and look forward to seeing their continued growth!