What's Happening in the Junior School

 Prep

What’s Happening in Prep in September

August was a fantastic month filled with exciting learning experiences and special events. Students visited Moonlit Sanctuary, where they deepened their knowledge of Australian animals and enjoyed seeing some of them up close.

The Preps have also been very busy creating their own non-fiction books about a chosen Australian animal. They have enjoyed researching and learning lots of interesting facts to include in their books.

Students loved watching their Year 6 buddies perform in their fantastic musical, Shrek!. To celebrate Book Week, everyone had a wonderful time dressing up as their favourite book characters and celebrating the joy of reading.

Over the next couple of weeks students will cover the following:

Wellbeing

• Growth Mindset and Persistence
• Zones of Regulation Review

Literacy

• Practising CVC, CCVC, CVCC words
• Identifying Gentle Cindy (ce, ge)
• Using dotted thirds to form letters correctly
• Identifying the difference between fiction and non-fiction

• Writing a sentence to inform

   

Maths

• Identifying equal shares
• Sharing equally between two
• Sharing equally between three
• Sharing equally with one left over
• Identifying amounts that can be shared equally into two groups
• Solving problems by sharing collections
• Making groups of two

• Making groups of three
• Making groups of different sizes
• Subitising to identify group size
• Identifying possible groups in collections to 20

• Solving problems by grouping

   

Knowledge Unit

Focus: Science

Big question: How do living things grow and change?

• What is a living thing? 
• What do living things need to survive? 

• What are some features of animals and plants?

   

Specialist

Please find below a timetable of when your child/rens class will attend specialist. 

Homework

Each week, your child/ren will bring home a blue reading pouch (satchel). Inside, you will find;

• Three decodable readers
• One picture storybook labelled Classroom Library. 
• A green “Decoding Detective/ Word Wizard” workbook

• Sound pack cards

   

These resources are designed to support your child’s reading practice at home. Please keep all reading materials stored in the reading pouch. Reading pouches should be returned to school each Friday so students can swap their books for the following week, and additional learning materials can be added.

Please note that at this early stage of the year, students are not expected to independently decode every word in their reading texts. At this point, they may focus on identifying individual sounds and recognising the “heart words” that have been explicitly taught in class (you can find these words within the Word Wizard section of the green workbook)Thank you for supporting your child’s reading journey at home!

Reminders

• Friday 4th September - Father’s Day Open Afternoon
• Thursday 10th September – R U OK Day
• Friday 18th September- Last Day of Term and Footy Day

Year 1

What’s Happening in Year 1 in September

Wellbeing 

In Wellbeing, we have been practising our morning routines to positively separate from our families, and have been exploring how small acts of kindness can have positive ripple effects as part of Bullying No Way Week. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be exploring the Respectful Relationships curriculum and revisiting identifying and naming emotions, identifying emotions from body language and recognising how different situations trigger different emotions. In Week 9, we will be learning about RUOK Day and how we can be a supportive friend. 

Literacy 

The Year 1 students continue to work through the UFLI structured, synthetic phonics program. During this time, they focus on developing their phonics knowledge, decoding skills, and confidence as early readers. Last month, the focus was on long vowel words that end in two consonants such as ld, nd, lt and st; Mr Y the Cheeky Guy, who steals the sounds of e and i at the end of a word and words ending in consonant le. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be learning about r-controlled vowels – ar, or, and the 3 spellings of the /er/ sound – er, ir and ur. Students will begin applying these skills to their reading and writing. We will also continue with our fluency reading, focusing on reading with accuracy, reading rates, and using expression when reading. Students will continue to work on practising our small letters in handwriting, focusing on correctly forming the letters n, x and z in both uppercase and lowercase. 

Language and Literature 

Our third mentor text for Term 3 will be Migaloo the White Whale by Mark Wilson. Students will use the text to: 

• Build our knowledge about humpback whales and learning about the incredible journey they make to Australian waters. 
• Explore the true story of Migaloo, the famous white humpback whale, and discover why he is so special. 
• Practise finding information that is directly stated in a text, as well as using clues to make inferences. 
• Explore the features of non-fiction texts and begin to think about how we can use facts and information to create our own informative writing. 

Our grammar focus will be creating noun groups with a modifier, an adjective and a noun and using them in sentences.  

Maths 

Throughout the month of September, students will continue to develop their understanding of Place Value. They will explore numbers by writing numerals and their associated number words, creating a variety of numbers using MAB blocks, and partitioning one-, two- and three-digit numbers. Students will also focus on adding and subtracting numbers within 20 and beyond. They will use physical and virtual materials, build on their part-part-whole knowledge to 10, and explore a variety of calculation strategies to solve problems and explain their thinking. 

Knowledge Unit 

As part of our Science unit, students will continue investigating the concept of solids, liquids and gases. In Week 8 students are very excited to be taking part in our incursion, focusing on chemical science. In Week 9 students will be making jelly by following a procedure and writing a science report including a prediction, observation and results. In Week 10, students will be reflecting on all of their learning in Science this term.  

Specialist Timetables 

1BM:  

• Tuesday: Performing Arts and Japanese 
• Wednesday: PE and Art 

1C: 

• Tuesday: Performing Arts and Japanese 

• Wednesday: PE and Art 

   

1M: 

• Monday: Performing Arts 
• Tuesday: PE and Art 

• Wednesday: Japanese 

   

1MC: 

• Monday: Performing Arts 
• Tuesday: PE and Art 

• Wednesday: Japanese 

   

Reminders: 

Fruit Snack 

Every morning at 9.55am students will have a fruit snack. You child must have their fruit/veggie snack in a separate smaller container to their lunch. 

Take Home Reading 

Please make sure you child brings their reading pouch with their three readers on Thursdays. Students should be reading every night for 15-20 minutes. It is important for students to read their take home readers multiple times to build fluency. Students will also take home a book from the classroom library. This will be a rich literature text and can be read by you to your child.  

You will also notice students bringing home a booklet of Heart words. Please also practice reading and spelling these words as part of your reading routine. 

Thank you for your support 😊 

Year 2

What’s Happening in Year 2 in September 

The Year 2s have continued to amaze us with their knowledge about plants and how they survive and thrive. Our ‘Plant Power’ incursion was a hit with students being shown how to extract chlorophyll from celery! Please see some photos below. The cohort are now working towards creating a short non-fiction paragraph about trees. We read a fantastic book called ‘The Gentle Genius of Trees’ so be prepared for an outpouring of trees facts! 

Over the next month, the Year 2 students will be learning to: 

Wellbeing 

• identify and apply different acts of friendships 
• identify words and actions we can use to show kindness to other people. 

Phonics 

• Review previously taught graphemes 
• Spelling rule: y to –ies 
• Spelling rule: drop the e 
• Low frequency spelling: -ar, -or & -our 

• trigraphs: air, are, ear 

   

Literacy 

• writing a topic sentence, supporting details and a conclusion for our own informative writing piece 
• publishing our writing piece 
• reading our new mentor text 

• continuing our sentence level writing focusing on fronted adverbial phrases, conjunctions and precise verbs

   

Maths 

• solving addition and subtraction problems using bar models  
• solving addition and subtraction word problems 
• solving equal groups problems (multiplication and division) with arrays 
• solving multiplication and division word problems 
• solving word problems using all four operations 

• solving mathematical problems  

   

Knowledge Unit  

This term, the Year 2 students have been studying Biological Science and exploring the question: What do plants need to grow and thrive? This month we will be finishing our information posters on trees.  

We will also be commencing a mini unit on: Digital Technology - Coding 

We will be exploring programming, sequencing, and problem-solving using beebots and Scratch Jr. 

Homework  

Your child will continue to swap their take-home books each Thursday. They will bring home three decodable texts. We strongly encourage students to reread these texts multiple times across the week as this is an important way novice readers develop automaticity and reading fluency. 

Students will also continue to bring home a classroom library textthat can be shared together. 

Reminders: 

• Father’s Day Stall – Wednesday 2nd September 
• Open Afternoon – Father's and Special Friend's Day: Friday 4th September