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)
Take-home books will be changed on Mondays - Your child can read and reread this throughout the week with you. Please use Wushka for more books online to read with your child. Login details are glued inside the front cover of diaries.
Fluency passages will be sent home weekly or fortnightly (depending on sounds learnt) - you can alternate these with the take-home books for reading practise at home. It is really important students are tracking the individual letters with their finger then blend all the sounds together.
Welcome!
Dear Foundation Families,
We’re excited to welcome back Mr Marco, and students took part in gardening sessions with him this week. Additionally, a highlight has been seeing how many students are coming into classrooms independently with a smile on their face. Amazing to see how responsible they are being unpacking their own belongings now and settling into our soft start of writing their name or using their letter chart.
Keep up the great work, Foundation!
Learning
Numeracy
This week in Maths, our Foundation students have been exploring key number concepts in fun and engaging ways! We have been learning about combinations to 5 and number bonds to 10, using ten frames to recognise quantities and exploring rainbow pairs.
The students have also discovered that half means two equal parts and that objects can be divided in different ways. To make learning hands-on and exciting, we used fruit, chocolate bars, and folded kinder squares to demonstrate our understanding. It has been wonderful to see the students' enthusiasm and growing confidence in their mathematical thinking!
Letters and sounds
Our sound knowledge is continuing to be built and we have learnt the letters
's,a,t,p,i,n,b,l,f,h,u,m,r' and 'c'. It is important to review sounds already taught to properly transfer the knowledge to our long term memory. We are focusing on segmenting and blending our letters to form full words and also learning to verbally substitute first and last sounds of words to form new words. Students love this, especially finding out new rhyming combinations! For example, the word 'sun' can be changed to 'fun' by changing the first sound of /s/ to a /f/.
Writing
We are having success using our letter chart to help make informed letter/sound choices for our spelling. Our letter chart supports students when writing as it links to our card deck that is done daily. Students are having success at using this letter chart (see below) in their core literacy sessions and writing sessions. We are learning to label a diagram, recount experiences and identify what verbs and nouns are. Knowing our heart words (the, to, was, is, has) is enabling students to have greater success with reading and writing.
Communities - Harmony Day
On Friday we were all able to celebrate Harmony Day. Fun activities were conducted in respective communities groups which the students loved!
Warm regards,
Alex, Rhiannon, Megan and Kate
Foundation Team
