Year Prep/1/2 News

It's been a busy fortnight in the Prep/One/Two rooms!

Wow! What a fortnight we have had in the Prep/One room. There was much excitement in anticipation of the Mother’s Day Spa Day. Loads of fun was had by all and the children really enjoyed spoiling the Mums, Aunts, Grandmas and special friends. We had better get our thinking hats on for a Father’s Day event!

In Literacy, we have been working with the MSL approach to improve the literacy skills of all children through a Multi Sensory Learning approach. This involves lots of auditory, body and verbal work with constant review and revising of sounds and letters daily. We introduced the concept of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and that the rest of the letters are called consonants. This will become vital as we start to learn spelling rules. Please don’t forget to fill out your child’s diary every night when they read, keeping a running total of the nights they have read so we can update our Reading Club chart.

During Maths we have explored addition using the ‘counting on’ method. Many children are able to use the ‘count all’ strategy to find a total but using the ‘counting on’ method is harder to grasp. ‘Counting on’ is starting from the largest number and counting on the other amount. E.g. 3+6 - start on the 6 and count 7,8,9 to find the total. The children have also explored measuring area and finding out which objects take up the most area by using concrete materials to cover a surface and counting and comparing amounts. We have also begun exploring capacity, how much can fit into a container. We will be using water, rice, containers, spoons, cups and finding out how much can fit inside a container. We will be using the terms ‘holds less’ and ‘holds more’. For our number fluency we have been counting to 100 by 1’s, 10’s and 5’s. How far can your child count? We have also been reciting the days of the week and months of the year. Next week we are moving onto subtraction.

Integrated Studies has had an interesting visit from the Responsible Pet Ownership Group. Kim and her dog Chelsie had the children enthralled and they have completed follow up activities in class. Check your child’s school bag for the pamphlet handed out with great links to songs from the presentation.

We have also looked at our Grandparent questionnaires and discussed at how things have changed since their Grandparents were young - in particular the telephone and next week kitchen appliances.

Don’t forget to log onto Compass and give permission and pay for the school excursion to Coal Creek on Thursday June 14th. The cost is $15. The children will be having a lesson in the Old School, participating in a session comparing how washing was done in the olden days compared to the present. We will tour the settlement and have a picnic by the lake (weather permitting).

I will be sending a roster home soon for Parent Helpers in the classroom. If you have some spare time please fill out a time slot. You will need to have a working with children’s check registered with the office. We are looking at activities such as letter recognition, sight word recognition, listening to reading, handwriting, maths etc.

Year 1/2

During spelling lessons we have reviewed open, closed and silent-e syllables and have started learning about the digraphs including ch. The students have enjoyed reading and spelling real and non-sense words that fit these syllable types and words which include ch. While reading we are practising sounding out words and choosing a good fit book. In Maths we have continued learning about addition using card games and Mathletics. We have also been learning about measurement including comparing the area of different Minecraft characters drawn by the students onto grid paper. Mrs D's growing belly was measured during Investigations and the students are excited about this measurement increasing each week. The students have enjoyed sharing their responses from their grandparent interviews and  have used these to discuss some differences between the past and the present. We had Kim and Chelsea (dog) come and visit us to teach us about Responsible Pet Ownership and we had a follow up lesson in the class to go over the main components of how to look after a pet, how to approach another persons dog and what to do around an angry dog.