Welcome to 2025

The Prep students have settled into school life beautifully. We are so proud of the way they are now independently lining up each morning, walking into the building quietly and putting away their bags. There are many new routines for our Preps to learn and we want to thank you for your support in helping them manage this transition to their new learning environment.

Literacy

Our Literacy block is based on a structured literacy model. It is broken into seven parts, including a daily review, phonics and phonemic awareness (see below), reading fluency, handwriting, comprehension, vocabulary and writing.

For the first hour of the Literacy block, Prep students will be using Phonics Plus, which is the Victorian government program for teaching phonics. Phonics Plus provides a progression of learning of letters (graphemes) and their corresponding sounds (phonemes) to decode words and develop morphological knowledge. The grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) are organised in 36 sets of code.

Phonics Plus will encompass the first four components of the Literacy block, as it also includes spelling patterns, morphology, high-frequency words, handwriting and reading fluency. 2025 is the first year that Phonics Plus has been released and Prep students will continue to use Phonics Plus for the first hour of their literacy block in subsequent years. Phonics Plus aligns with Sounds Write with its philosophies and practices.

In the first few weeks, the Preps have been learning to read and write 's', 'a', 't', 'p', 'i', 'n' and build words that use these sounds, such as 'tap,' 'sit,' and 'pat.' Decodable readers will be sent home with the Preps from Week 5 onwards and students will retain the same reader for the full week. We will provide more information about these in the next newsletter.

The second hour of the Literacy block will be teaching reading and writing through a 'Core Knowledge' unit and 'Story Champs'. The students will work through a different core knowledge unit each term, and the focus of the unit will align with the Inquiry focus for the term.

In Term 1, the Prep students will be working on the Core Knowledge unit, 'Let's Explore our World.' Each week, the students will learn about a different continent and the landmarks, habitats, natural features and a day in the life of a child who lives on that continent. This will provide a global context for when we focus on Australia and our local community in the second half of the unit. The first continent that we explored was Asia and the students loved learning about Mt. Everest and the busy cities of Tokyo and New Delhi. In the next two weeks we will be exploring Africa and North America. Whilst learning about Africa, the students will focus on the Nile River, Sahara Desert, animals found in Africa and the Pyramids. Whilst learning about North America, the students will learn about the Grand Canyon, Denali, Rio Grande/Rio Brava, black bears and eagles.

This year our P-2 students will also be using an evidence-based program called Story Champs. The program allows students to engage with a variety of stories to develop their oral language and writing skills. They will also develop their understanding of simple and advanced story structure, vocabulary, complex linguistic features, and informational text structure.

Maths

Students in Prep-2 will be using Explicit Maths Program (EMP) to teach Maths. EMP is systematically sequenced according to evidence-based science of learning principles, includes regular (daily) review and is explicitly taught with dynamic instructional routines. The program has been designed to be highly responsive with regular opportunities for student interactions and low variance, which ensures that students in all classes receive the same instruction. In the first few weeks, the students will be focusing on counting forwards and backwards, correct formation of numerals and 2D shapes.

Key Reminders and Dates

Sunsmart: students need to be wearing hats when they are outside at school. They are also welcome to bring their own sunscreen and apply themselves during recess and lunch.
Nude Food - Resource Smart School:
As part of our commitment to being a ‘resource smart school’, we encourage all students and staff to bring nude food to school as much as possible.
By practising Nude Food across the school, we reduce the amount of packaging and waste we bring to school that ends up in our bins to be sent to landfill.
Nude Food is a fantastic opportunity to educate children about how their actions can impact the environment and their health. Focussing on the positive message of ‘nude food = a healthy body + a healthy planet’. As a school we pride ourselves on reducing our ‘footprint’ and caring about the beautiful environment that we are so lucky to live in.
Student assessments: students will continue to have Wednesdays off during February. Their first full week of school will be Week 5, beginning Monday, 3rd March.
Specialist timetable: Your child's teacher will send you a specialist timetable this week. Please note that this year our timetable has Week A (odd weeks - Week 3, 5 etc.) and Week B (even weeks - Week 4, 6 etc).

Barwon Heads Primary School Teaching And Learning Update

To empower students to shape and enrich the world around them.

Teaching And Learning Update - Term 1, Week 3 · 11 Feb 2025

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