Foundation

The past two weeks in Foundation have been incredibly busy and exciting! We celebrated our milestone of being 100 days brighter, delved into the fascinating world of chemicals with the Jollybops science incursion, unleashed our creativity with Lego, and had a blast with our Potato Olympics. Check out the photos below to see all the fun and learning we've had!

Important Dates:

Week 5

Monday 12th August – Wednesday 14th August – Scholastic Book Fair

Wednesday 14th August – Wheels Parade (morning)

Week 6

Monday 19th August – Book Week Dress Up Day and Parade

Tuesday 20th August – Book Week Author Visit: Nicky Johnston

Wheels Parade

This term we have been learning all about toys and how they move. This coming Wednesday 14th August we will be holding our annual Wheels Parade! It will start at 9.10 on the basketball courts. Students are encouraged to bring along a toy that has wheels (bike, scooter, pram, remote control car etc). If you wish to hang around and watch, we would love to see you there! Students riding bikes, scooters or on roller blades should also be wearing helmets. 

We would appreciate any parents that are then able to take home (especially bigger) items such as bikes straight after the Wheels Parade as it will be difficult to store things in the classroom. 

Book Week Dress Up Day and Parade

Book Week is almost here! This year’s theme is "Reading is Magic." We’re kicking off the festivities with our legendary Book Week Parade on Monday 19th August. All students are encouraged to dress up as a character from a book of their choice.

We also have the fabulously talented Nicky Johnston joining us as our visiting author. She’s the creative genius behind the Coco series and other enchanting stories like At the End of Holyrood Lane, The Fix-It Man, Grandma Forgets, and The Incredibly Busy Mind of Bowen Bartholomew Crisp. Nicky will be joining us on Tuesday, 20th August.

Vermont Primary School Writing Competition

We would love the Foundation students to have a go at this competition on their own! Stories that have lots of parent help (for example, perfect spelling!) are less likely to be the winner in Foundation. We are looking for the student's best effort. 

More information is included on the Literacy Page of the Newsletter.

Maths – Addition Strategies

We know many students have done a great job of memorising addition facts either this year or prior to attending school. Memorised facts such as ‘friends of 10’ and ‘doubles’ are helpful, but we are finding that often our students are not attempting to solve ‘unknown’ addition problems and instead guessing or saying they do not know the answer. This is happening with students who can count to very high numbers and may even know multiplication facts, even with simple single digit addition problems such as 5 + 4. 

In the classroom we encourage students to use a strategy to solve addition problems, rather than rely on memory. Some strategies we are focused on:

Counting all – where students use fingers or blocks to model the problem e.g. 4 + 5, get 4 counters and 5 counters then count them all.

Counting on – where students lock the larger number in their brain then count on the smaller number of times. E.g. lock in 5 then count on “6, 7, 8, 9”. Your child will usually need to use their fingers or counters to keep track.

If you want to help with this at home, you can ask your child to solve some single digit addition problems and EXPLAIN WHAT THEIR BRAIN DID! This helps take the emphasis off just giving an answer and places the importance on how they did it.

Potato Olympics

This week, we held the Potato Olympics in Foundation! At the beginning of the week, we created our potato athletes and participated in various events, including long-distance rolling, breakdancing, gymnastics, and more. Well done to all our potato competitors!

100 Days of School Celebration!

Our 100 Days of School Celebration was filled with excitement and fun! Congratulations to our wonderful Foundation students on their amazing progress—you're now 100 days smarter!

Jollybops Whole School Science Incursion

Thank you to Mrs. Lewis for organising such a hilarious and engaging incursion during Science Week. We had an absolute blast learning about different chemicals, and some of our Foundation students even got to participate as volunteers!

Lego Incursion

The students (and grown-ups) had an absolute blast with Ryan from Lego Masters this week! In teams, we designed and built ‘the best car ever’ and tested their strength and speed by launching them down a ramp. We also faced the exciting challenge of building the tallest tower.

Art Smocks

In the coming weeks, we will be starting Inquiry rotations, where students will get to experience a range of different activities. One of these activities include Messy Play! Please ensure that you have returned the art smocks that were washed over the holidays, as they are also needed for our weekly art sessions.

Inquiry - Boxes

We will be designing and building toys later in the term. We would love it if you could start collecting and sending in cardboard boxes such as cereal boxes etc. Please no empty egg cartons or toilet rolls. Thank you!

What’s on in the Classroom?

Maths

- practising different strategies to help us solve addition and subtraction equations.

- collecting data, creating graphs and interpreting the information on our graphs.

Literacy

- revising and learning new sounds.

- learning common words.

- using our sounds to read simple sentences.

Writing

- handwriting a letter to children in Kindergarten, answering their questions about life in primary school:

- developing our letter formation on dotted-thirds.

- continuing to explore narratives, and retelling the beginning and middle of the story ‘Zog’:

Show and Tell Timetable: