Argus-Xenica Community Report

Welcome to The Argus-Xenica Community Newsletter, this is the first newsletter of the term, and to kick things off, we have seen great adaptation on the student’s part. Us teachers hope that the students have enjoyed their long rest and we hope that they are rejuvenated for another term of learning. We have a great number of events planned for this term, including 100 Days of Prep, Book Week and Wurundjeri Bunjil Incursion. Once again, we aspire to a great term for your children and hope they gain the maximal amount of knowledge possible from this term.

Reading

In Reading, we have started a new topic named information texts. We have just started, and students are trying to grasp at this conception. We are currently teaching them the structure and features of an information text and are trying to help them distinguish between this type of text and others we have covered. Right now, we are analysing to see if the students can understand this so we can move on and further develop knowledge. In the coming weeks, we will be working on procedural text. We are continuing CVC words and have officially reached Phase 4, in which the understanding of the students will be challenged and administered.

Writing

We are also working on information texts in writing. Children are practicing how to write these texts to increase their understanding on informational texts and how they are formatted/created. We provide students with different topics to conduct informational texts on to further build their perception on this notion. We are also still working on CVC words; children are proving to be able to segment sounds and write CVC words. We are still teaching students to create sentences and children are now learning how to create a sentence structure (capitalisation, spacing, and punctuation).

Maths

We have started a new topic encompassing 3D shape. To expand, we are teaching them the differences between 3D and 2D shapes and are teaching them features of 3D shapes, we provide them with questions to help them cultivate on their learning. We have seen an abundance of success in this realm and are expecting even more in the future. We are also working on multiplication in the classroom, once students have developed a firm understanding on multiplication, we will start on division. Once we have completed teaching shapes, we will work on positional words; these words help the children express their contributions when it comes to a direction or an object in relation to another. These words include; above, behind, besides, in front, under, on top, above, in-between, and next to. We exercise the student’s understanding by giving them manipulatives and giving them a positional word to move the manipulative (e.g., Put the toy behind you).

Inquiry

In Inquiry, the children have been learning about the different cultures in the community, including the food, celebrations and practices that are unique to different cultural backgrounds. In our celebration of NAIDOC Week, the children learnt more about the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and explored books about the Dreamtime and children's books written by Aboriginal people.