Foundation

Last week the Foundation students celebrated 100 days of school. The theme was 100 days brighter and students dressed up in their brightest clothes. We started our day by decorating 100 days of school crowns and discussing what things we have learned this year and what we would do with 100 things (e.g. dollars, lollies, cats etc). We then did an exciting activity where we matched the teachers at BPS to their Foundation photo. 

After recess we made fairy bread with 100s and 1000s, students had to make their own learning how to spread the butter, and ensure that the sprinkles covered all of their bread. We of course got to enjoy it afterwards. 

In our Maths session for the day we worked in partners to see who could be the fastest to race to 100 along a 100's chart and we practiced counting to 100 in different ways. Our day ended with a dance party and a special certificate for our students to keep. 

LITERACY

In Writing we are consolidating our letter and sound knowledge to write words (CVC, CVCC and CCVC) independently. Students have been encouraged to use their phoneme fist to count the sounds that they are hearing in words so that they are ensuring they are recoding them all. Within our writing sessions we have been exploring narratives and rewriting endings to some known stories, including Wombat Stew, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Students have enjoyed being creative in the way that they change the stories to make them their own.

In Reading we have been practising reading 4 letter words that are decodable and have been exploring summarising a text in different ways including into the beginning, middle and end as well as identifying the characters, problem and solution in our weekly text. Students have particularly enjoyed retelling stories through puppets. 

NUMERACY

In Numeracy we have started to introduce subtraction within our classrooms. Students have enjoyed engaging in lots of hands on experiences to develop their understanding of take away. We will also be looking at jumping back along a number line to solve simple subtraction sums and pulling out key information in subtraction number stories in order to solve them. 

INQUIRY

Our Inquiry topic for this term is Development of Resilience (Recognising problems or challenges). This week we have been discussing Problem Solving independently. We discussed people who can help us within the community and how to be safe in the community. Students enjoyed sharing their knowledge of firemen, life guards and police officers.

• Homework goes home on Mondays and comes back to school on Fridays.
• Families are welcome to come to our cohort and school assemblies on Fridays at 2:30. Cohort assemblies are held in the large Grade 1/2 space (through the blue door), and the school assemblies will be held outside under the COLA (unless otherwise advised).
• As the weather is becoming cooler, students are encouraged to bring/wear warm coats/jackets, mittens/gloves, beanies or earmuffs outside.
• Please ensure your child has fruit, a snack, and lunch as well as a water bottle.
• Lunch orders - Please ensure all lunch orders are placed in the lunch order basket at the beginning of the day. Occasionally, students have forgotten to place lunch orders in the basket and have had an emergency lunch provided.
• Keep up the positive after-school routines (homework, dinner conversations, bedtime).
• Don't forget - School begins at 8:35am daily. Students that attend after 8:50am will need to sign in at the office.

Things you can work on at home:

• Letter and sound recognition (recognising upper and lowercase letters and their most common sound) for all letters of the alphabet.
• Heart word recognition (recognising explicitly taught words) - My, my, The, the, I, Me, me, like, can, to, so, go, was, we, she, he, do, of, are, too, for, her, see, say, day, into, you.
• Reading a shared book every night focusing on concepts of print (identifying the front cover, a word, a letter, 1:1 finger pointing, talking about the story and using specific vocabulary)
• Fine motor activities – using playdoh, cutting, threading – to strengthen hand muscles
• Build and write taught CV (consonant vowel) no, go, do, to, VC (vowel consonant), is, am on, up, and CVC (consonant vowel consonant) words, cat, met, top, pit, nut etc
• Having nightly dinner conversations with the family (talk about the day)
• Have your child help out in the kitchen by measuring ingredients when you are making meals, and counting items that are going in the basket at the shops. This will assist in developing counting skills
• Look at some of the information provided under the Literacy, Numeracy and SEL/Inquiry headings and review these tasks to reinforce learning.