What's Happening in the Junior School

Prep

What’s Happening in Prep in Weeks 1 and 2

Welcome back to Term 3! The Prep team hope you and your family had a wonderful and restful holiday. It has been lovely hearing about all the Prep’s exciting adventures over the break. Term 3 is shaping up to be a busy yet fun term of learning and events. Please take note of the many important dates below. There will be more information regarding each of these events sent out via Compass over the coming weeks.

Wellbeing

Revising learnt strategies to regulate our emotions

Literacy

Practising CVC, CCVC, CVCC words
Identifying the diagraph ch /ch/ charlie
Reviewing learnt diagraphs; ck /k/, th, sh and ch
Using dotted thirds to form letters correctly
Identifying the difference between fiction and non-fiction
Writing a sentence to inform

Maths

Comparing and order numbers on a number line
Representing addition using picture stories
Representing addition number stories on a ten-frame
Representing subtraction using picture stories
Representing subtraction number stories on a ten-frame

Knowledge Unit

Big Question: How do living things grow and change?

Throughout Term 3, students will be exploring the following lines of inquiry:

What is a living thing?
What do living things need to survive?
What are some features of animals and plants?

Homework

Students take home three decodable readers in their reading pouch each week as well as their green Decoding Detective book and Sound Pack. Please continue to read these with your child, the Prep students love showing you how they can recognise and recall all learnt letters and sounds. Reading pouches are returned on Mondays to be changed over and checked by their teacher.

Reminders

Wednesday 30th July - Prep 100 Days of School Celebration. Students are invited to come to school dressed in their pyjamas and a dressing gown if they wish. Please ensure the Preps wear closed-toe shoes (Ugg boots/runners are great). A special lunch will be organised for the day (more info to come via Compass), please still pack a snack and drink bottle. At 3:15 pm, we would love to invite parents into their child’s classroom for a ‘medal ceremony’ to congratulate each student. Students will then be dismissed at 3:30 pm as per a usual school day following a dance party.
Monday 4th & Tuesday 5th August - Parent Teacher Interviews (please refer to Compass for further information)
Wednesday 20th August – Moonlit Sanctuary Excursion
Friday 22nd August– Book Week dress up day

Year 1

What’s Happening in Year 1 in Weeks 1 and 2

Welcome back to Term 3!

Over the next fortnight, Year 1 students will be learning about...

Wellbeing

In wellbeing, students are working across the cohort to reflect on their emotional responses, discuss ways in which they can take responsibility for their actions, describe ways to express our emotions which shows awareness of feelings and needs of others and practice techniques to deal with feelings of fear, anger and frustration.

We will also be catching up with our Year 5 buddies once a week to engage in buddy reading and wellbeing workshops. This will further deepen our connections to the older year levels at our school.

Literacy

Students will be working on:

Phonics: Students will learn how to read and spell the trigraphs <tch> /ch/and <dge> /j/
Reading Fluency: Reading with accuracy and at an appropriate rate
Handwriting: Correctly forming the letter i, both uppercase and lowercase
Students will be writing a holiday recount writing with a focus on using capital letters, finger spaces and full stops
Students will be exploring the language used in the picture story book The Boy Who Tried to Shrink His Name, Sandhya Parappukkaran and Michelle Pereira
Students will be identifying nouns and verbs in a sentence
Students will be categorising verbs

Maths

Students will be working on sharing and grouping. As part of this unit of work students will:

Share equally into a given number of groups
Share collections into two groups and find half
Share a collection and describe the groups
Share a collection into a given number of groups, as an array
Identify how many groups are needed to share a collection equally
Use sharing to solve problems

Knowledge Unit

We will be starting a new Knowledge Unit topic - chemical science (materials and changes). In this unit, students learn that everyday materials can be physically changed in a variety of ways. They will conduct investigations with different objects, including everyday materials. Predictions and comparisons will be made about how the shapes of objects made from different materials can be physically changed through actions such as bending, stretching and twisting. Students will also explore how materials change when heated or cooled.

Library

Students will be attending the library on Thursday each week as a cohort. Please ensure that students have their blue library satchel in their bag to keep their borrowed book protected when transporting to and from school. This will help keep these books separate from their ‘Classroom Library’ picture story book that they take home on a Monday.

Year 2

What’s Happening in Year 2 in Weeks 1 and 2

Welcome back to Term 3! We trust all families had a restful and enjoyable holiday break. It has been wonderful to welcome students back into the classroom. We enjoyed finishing off last term by creating our very own Acknowledgements of Country. The students demonstrated their artistic skills by having a go at symbol drawing. Over the next few weeks, students will be diving into rich and exciting learning experiences across all areas of the curriculum. This week we will begin our new Knowledge Unit: Design and Technologies, where students will investigate how forces affect movement in everyday life.

We are looking forward to a productive and engaging start to the term!

Over the next fortnight, the Year 2 students will be learning:

Wellbeing

Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships curriculum:

NAIDOC - Strength, Vision Legacy
working together: cooperative games

Phonics

We are learning to:

use the suffixes -s, -es
use the suffixes -er, -est
use the suffixes –ly, -less & -ful

Literacy

We are learning to:

use subject & object pronouns correctly in our writing
answering comprehensive questions
building new vocabulary

Maths

We are learning:

solving addition equations with near doubles
two-digit addition and subtraction fact families
mental addition and subtraction with place value partitioning
adding and subtracting one with two-digit numbers
adding and subtracting ten with two-digit numbers
two-digit number addition using base-10 blocks (with regrouping)
two-digit number subtraction using base-10 blocks (with regrouping)
two-digit number addition on an empty number line (no regrouping)

Knowledge Unit

This term, the Year 2 students will be learning about Design and Technologies.

We will be exploring the big question: How can we use push and pull forces to design and improve something that moves?

Over the next fortnight, students will be exploring the following lines of inquiry:

How does a push or pull affect the way an object moves?
How does changing the strength of a force affects the movement of objects?
How does the pull of gravity affect objects?

Homework

Please continue to read the take home reading books each week, aiming for 15 – 20 minutes each evening. Changing readers will continue to occur on a Friday.
Please enjoy sharing a new Classroom Library text each Friday. This book is for enjoyment and can be read by parents/carers.
Optional: Mathletics logins have been placed in the front cover of reading diaries. Students may work through these tasks at their own pace, if desired.

Library Days:

2A - Friday

2P- Friday

2L - Wednesday

2F – Wednesday