Prep News

Important Reminders

Take Home Books: We will begin to send decodable texts home from Monday the 17th of July. Please ensure that your child has their Take Home Bag. If they do not bring their Take Home Bag, they will not be able to bring a decodable text home.
100 Days of School - Monday 31st of July Click here for more information.
As this is a huge achievement for students and parents, we would like to invite parents into the classroom from 8.45-9am.
School Tools: Just a friendly reminder that your child’s school tools book is a great resource for home and school. Inside are word lists (both decodable and heart words) to practise and logins to both Maths Seeds and Wushka.

Learning in Action

Literacy

In Reading students have been working hard on their reading accuracy skills, learning the new strategy of ‘looking for parts we know’. When students encounter a new word they are encouraged to find a part or chunk they know, for example an ‘s’ on the end or a heart word like ‘and’ in ‘stand’.

We have also been reading poems in class. We have focused on reading them for enjoyment and thinking about how they make us feel. In Writing, we have learnt some new spelling rules. We have added ‘s’ to the end of words to show that there is more than one and have determined when to use the letter ‘c’ or ‘k’ when writing words that start with the /k/ sound.

Preview- We will continue to revise our reading accuracy strategies and continue learning about poems.

Maths

In Maths over the past few weeks students have been learning about ordinal numbers, which is the order something comes in. Students have been able to verbalise and identify up to the tenth position. We have used races, daily timetables, buildings, AFL ladders and ran physical races to help students understand ordinal numbers in various forms.

During our data unit, students have learnt to collect data and ask their classmates “Which animal do you prefer?” Students used this data and represented it in a graph.

Students also enjoyed solving a maths problem to ‘create a dance with five dance moves’. Students loved this challenge and had fun collaborating in small groups to solve the problem.

Preview: Next week we will learn about teen numbers and how to represent them using concrete materials. We will also start learning about time and days of the week.

Inquiry

Over the past fortnight the Preps have commenced our history unit ‘Our Life Stories.’ The students loved playing a game of ‘Guess the Baby’ and thought we all were “cutie pies.” Once we figured out who everyone was, we looked into how we have changed in looks and behaviour since then.

Here were a few suggestions:

“Babies wear a nappy and we use a toilet”

“When we were babies we cried A LOT, but now we only cry sometimes”

“I can run and walk now, but when I was a baby I just bum shuffled or crawled”

“Babies are chubby and squishy, but we are all grown up and strong now”

This week students furthered their learning by sorting “Jo’s” life events into a timeline, knowing that there are important things that occur and change as we grow up.

Preview- Next week students will learn about different cultural celebrations and discuss celebrations they have experienced.

Wellbeing

The work students have been doing on Friendship Facts has been incredibly valuable. Discussing respecting their friends and valuing differences, students have been engaged in remembering not to ‘yuck’ their friends’ ‘yum’!

Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships this term has focussed on stress management. Students were given a range of scenarios and asked to stand on a ‘stress line’ across the floor to represent their stress level in the given situations. At one end was the ‘deep end’, where things are very stressful, and at the other was the ‘shallow end’, where things are easy. The rest of the line was a bit of a middle ground. It was very interesting to see the different stress levels for different scenarios and to discuss ways students might cope with different stressful situations!

Students also shared some coping strategies and drew pictures of themselves using ‘cheering up’ and ‘calming down’ strategies that they like to use.

Preview: Next week for RRRR, we will be beginning a new topic, Help-seeking. Friendology will see students begin on their fifth topic, Friend-o-Meter.

Little Learners Dress Up Day:

On Wednesday the 26th of July, the Preps had an amazing day celebrating Milo Monkey’s Birthday Surprise, after finally meeting all the characters and learning every sound in the alphabet! We had a ball dressing up, making party hats, parading, playing alphabet bingo and a lot more. Thank you for all your efforts in making costumes, the Preps looked fantastic!