Prep/1 Mainstream

It has been a productive few weeks with students learning the routines and structure of the school day. Grade Ones have been practising being positive role models for our Foundation students, supporting them to feel safe and happy at school. For the next two weeks, we are focusing on the classroom expectation of ‘keeping our hands and feet to ourselves”. We encourage families to speak with their child about this at home to reinforce what they are learning in school. This helps to ensure everyone feels safe and respected at school.

Throughout the rest of the term we will focus on a new classroom expectation every two weeks, as part of our Integrated unit focus “Belonging”. Through stories, play, and other classroom activities, students learn about each of these values:

1. Raise our hand if we want to say something
2. Listening when it is someone else’s turn to speak
3. Following the teacher’s instructions straight away, and being in the right place at the right time
4. Keeping our hands and feet to ourselves
5. Keeping ourselves and each other safe

Literacy

In Reading, we started our daily phonics routine. In Foundation, the focus is on learning the sounds of the letters of the alphabet, starting with m - Milo monkey (Stage 1, Little Learners Love Literacy). In Year 1, the focus is revising double letters such as “ff/ll/ss”, (Stage 4+).

In Writing, students are practising retelling events from their personal world and from stories they have listened to. For Foundation students, the focus is on participating in discussion and teacher modelling of recounts. They are also being encouraged to identify familiar sounds in words. For Year One students, the focus is on writing sentences and applying their knowledge of sentence boundary punctuation (capital letters and full stops).

Maths

Counting is an important foundational skill for maths learning, as is understanding one-to-one correspondence. It is not enough to know the number names; students also need to know that each number represents a collection. We encourage families to practise counting skills at home to support students feeling comfortable working with collections to 20 (Foundation) and 120 (Year 1). Dice throwing games are an excellent way to do this.