Foundation Learning Community News

We are very excited to have a local walk this Friday to Sam Merrifield Library. This is to continue our investigation into our local community for Inquiry. We will enjoy a Storytime with the Children's Librarian, explore what the library has to offer and walk back to school with a quick play in Queen's Park. It is quite a walk for little legs so we are expecting a tired bunch of Preps Friday afternoon!

Literacy:

Cody Camel, Danny Dingo, Hannah Hippo, Eric Elephant and Nigel Numbat have joined our phonics crew. The new letters have provided us with the opportunity to sound out and write so many new words, so many in fact that our teachers have begun teaching us how to compose sentences! We are learning about how to use capital letters correctly, making sure we have clear spaces and that we end our sentences with a full stop.

We have had the opportunity to explore in detail the text, Possum in the House. Learning about how to complete a retell and make connections has deepened our understanding of the book and we even made a cute possum to take home and hang up.

Our Preps have begun to take home decodable readers. These provide them with the opportunity to read texts independently as they focus on the sounds we have learned. The texts also provide an opportunity to practise reading "tricky" words. These words are deemed tricky as we have not as yet learned how to sound them out. We work on tricky words early as they are commonly found in our reading and we also need to use them frequently in our writing. A good example of a tricky word we encounter frequently is was, if we asked students to sound out and spell this word they would probably write sound it out as /w/o/z.

Numeracy:

We have begun to explore the concept of time. In Foundation this involves ordering what we do in a day, thinking about the duration of events and a short exposure to reading clocks. We have explored what we can do in a second and a minute, and spent a lot of time working on the order of days of the week. Our song we performed at our assembly has helped us with this and was also a lot of fun!

Inquiry:

We have had a visit from the police where we were able to learn about their role in the community, had a sneak peak inside a police vehicle and heard the very loud siren!

The firefighters came to speak to us in week 5 about fire safety. We were very lucky to have a special firefighter visitor - Harvey's Dad! We are excited to have the second visit from the firefighters where they will bring along some firetrucks and we may even be able to have a go at spraying water from those huge hoses.

Assembly:

Thank you to everyone who was able to attend our week 5 assembly. Due to soggy weather we were inside the Prep Hall - a little intimate but a great occasion to celebrate the achievements of our peers and perform a little song :)