Classroom News 

Foundation

Welcome back to Term 3! Our students have settled back into classroom and school routines. It has been lovely to see so many happy faces each morning, ready to get on with learning each day.

This Friday the 26th of July we will be celebrating 100 Days of School. We would like all the students to dress up, showing how they may look when they are 100 years old.  We do not expect you to buy costumes, but rather look for clothes that you may already have or can borrow eg shawls, braces, caps etc.. 

Kmart does have some inexpensive 100 Days accessories, if you would like something extra.

Last week we had our Fairytale Fiasco Incursion, what a fun way to begin our Unit of work into Fairytales! Students were transported into an upside-down Fairy Tale Land.

Literacy 

We continue with our Heggerty’s program each day to develop phonological and phonemic awareness.  We cover the consonants, short vowels, digraphs, blends and rhyme patterns in language play activities. The short lessons are fast paced and repetitive and are usually completed first thing in the morning or just prior to our Literacy sessions. 

In Reader’s Workshop our  focus mentor texts are based on Fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, The Three  Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk just to name a few. We will be looking at Comprehension through a variety of strategies such as inferring characters’ feelings, making text connections, questioning and retelling the story using beginning, middle, and end. Students will continue to track their thinking in reading with sticky notes.

In Writer’s Workshop, we explore writing for different purposes as well as looking at the specific language features. This term students will look at how to edit their writing and begin to learn to self-correct, noticing punctuation, correct spelling of high frequency words, and adding or deleting words in their writing.  Students will also begin publishing their work for their Writer’s Gift, which will come home at the end of the year. Teachers continue to work with students to develop each student’s goals. In Spelling sessions, we will be investigating diagraphs such as:  sh, ch, th, ph and wh. We will look at patterns in words with rimes and onsets.

Numeracy

What a marvellous start to our Maths lessons this term. As we dive into the land of fairytales we are working hard to use our problem solving skills to strengthen our knowledge of maths concepts. Our first task was to design a Blue Bot path for Little Red Riding Hood to get to Nanna’s House. Putting our thinking caps on, we have coded a track for the Blue bots using direction and location skills. Throughout the term, we will continue with Fluency games every day that incorporate counting and place value. Other topics throughout the term include Shape, Patterns, Sharing, Measurement, Subtraction and Time. 

Inquiry

This term our focus is STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), where the students will work through the design process to create a variety of objects. The students will design and plan their objects and use recycled materials to make their design come to life. During this process, students will investigate how an object moves depending on size and shape, a push or a pull affects or how an object moves or changes shape. Keep an eye out on Compass for an invite to our families to come along in Week 5 to assist students with their watercraft. 

Thank you,

The Foundation Team