Prep Wonga Weekly
Week 3, Term 3
INFORMATION
🗓️ Upcoming Dates:
Tuesday the 30th July - CyberSafety Project Parent Webinar https://cybersafetyproject.com.au/parents/
Thursday 1st August: Gymnastics, Session #2 (5 sessions, every Thursday)
Thursday 1st August: Volunteer Childsafe Training(online) 5-5.30pm
Friday 2nd August: TRIBES Olympics Day
Monday 5th August: 100 Days Brighter! (please change the date on your calendar!)
Wednesday 7th August: Parent, Student, Teacher conferences, 3.45 - 8pm
Thursday 8th August: Parent, Student, Teacher conferences, 3.45 - 6pm
Friday 9th August: Staff Professional Practice Day - no students at school
Monday 12th August: Fairytale Fiasco Incursion ($23 via Sentral portal)
🗞️ News Groups: My favourite fairy tale character
Please help your child prepare by talking about how they are going to share this information with their group.
📚 Term 3 timetable change - weeks 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6
Here is a reminder of the specialists classes for each Prep grade. *Remember that Prep A library / Auslan sessions will be on Friday for the next 5 weeks.
🏰 Boxes for STEM creation
In week 4, we will be creating a fairy tale creation! We would love it if each family could donate 2 - 3 cardboard boxes to their classroom.
🤸🏽 Gymnastics
Thank you to those parents who have volunteered their time to help us with this program. An email will be sent out to our parent volunteers each Monday as a reminder of the upcoming session you have offered to help with.
A few things extra things to consider for our Gymnastics program:
-For ease of movement, tracksuit pants or leggings are best to wear for these sessions
-Please ensure that your child brings a named water bottle
-All long hair should be tied back for our gymnastics sessions
-Velcro or buckles are best for gymnastics days, if your child is unsure about how to tie their shoes
📸 Learning Snapshots on Showbie
Showbie is an app designed to assign, collect and share student work, and we use this app at WPPS to share 'Learning Snapshots'. Preps are in the process of learning how to upload work to Showbie, so that they can share their learning with you at home. Over the next week, all students will be logged into Showbie and regular Learning Snapshots will be shared here.
Keep an eye on the Wonga Weekly where we will share what has been / going to be uploaded. No doubt, your child will let you know if something has been uploaded, as they are always proud to share their work!
CURRICULUM
📚 Phonemic awareness: reading and phonics
Students will read decodable words, phrases and texts, using their knowledge of sounds to segment and blend words. We will look at some 'irregular' words, and discuss the parts of the word that need to be learnt 'by heart'.
Students will learn about the digraph 'ch', and then they will review the digraphs they have learnt so far: 'ck', 'sh', voiced and unvoiced 'th' and 'ch'.
What can you do at home?
*Assist your child to read their decodable 'take home' book each night* (see note below about re-reading books)
-Explore the Reading Eggs library and Fast Phonics to read decodable texts
-Continue to revise sounds on the sound/letter rings, and high frequency words
📝 Literature: reading responses and writing
The mentor text this week is the fairytale, Sleeping Beauty. Students will use this text to form the basis of their literary responses, like describing character traits, comparing characters and using adjectives to describe setting. Students will also write a short summary of the story, starting with the words, 'Once Upon a Time...'
Students will revise the exit and entry points for the letters 'c' and 'h', to match our phonics focus.
What can you do at home?
-Reinforce correct entry and exit points for letters if your child writes at home
-Provide authentic opportunities for your child to write at home eg. writing birthday cards, shopping lists and keeping score in games.
-Practise lower case letter formations on the app 'red writing'
🔢 Maths
Students will explore concepts of time, including 'yesterday, today and tomorrow'. They will sequence the days of the week and create their own timetable of a week at school. They will discus times of the day including afternoon, night, midday, sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk. Students will identify the time of day from pictures and justify why they might think this.
What can you do at home?
-Talk about times of the day using the language listed above. What do you do at these times of the day? Other ideas for questions you could ask are:
- What day is it today?
- What day was it yesterday?
- What day will it be tomorrow?
- What do we do on the weekend? How is the weekend different to weekdays?
-Continue to talk about teen numbers including how to read and say them.
🌏 CBL - Respect
We will look at our definition of 'respect' and what that looks like in our daily lives. We will also connect our work with fairytales in literature to our thinking around the Big Idea of respect. First, we will definite what a fairytale actually is, and then we will look at how respect (or more often, disrespect!) is demonstrated in fairytales.
👯 Friendology
In this session, students will learn about sharing, taking turns and playing fairly when tricky (age appropriate) situations occur. They will also learn about how to kindly say 'no' and when this might be necessary.
*A note about re-reading take home books ... and why it's OK if your child brings home the same book!
Sometimes, your child might forget to change their take home book or choose one that they have read before. Did you know ... this is actually a good thing! Fluency is the main aim of oral reading, and one way fluency occurs is when automaticity* has been achieved (*the quality or fact of being performed involuntarily or unconsciously, as a reflex, innate process, or ingrained habit). One way we can develop automaticity in reading is to have multiple practice opportunities.
We have included a link below which provides more information about this: