Prep News

Welcome to our Prep newsletter!

📅 Important Dates & Reminders

Reminders -

Please read with your child each night, children are given the opportunity to swap readers daily.
Sun hats are required for play, plese send your child with their school har daily.

3rd September - Fathers Day Stall

4th September - Fathers Day/Special Person PREP morning visit 9:10-9:50

18th September - Footy Dress Up Day and last day of Term 3 (2:30pm dismissal)

Literacy

In Literacy, we have been enjoying listening to the story Farmer John’s Tractor. We have been discussing the story and responding to both literal (“right there”) and inferential questions.

Preps have been focusing on story mapping and exploring the narrative hill, identifying the characters, setting, problem and solution. We practised retelling the story to a partner, making sure to include all the important elements.

We then became creative and changed our story map by introducing a new character, Farmer Jane, and a new setting, the beach. We have also been building our knowledge of sentences by creating sentences that include who, what they do and when. Using images from Farmer John’s Tractor, we have also been practising creating and writing our own ‘who, what doing and when’ sentences based on what we can see in the pictures.

Preview - Children will be exploring the book ‘Wombat Stew’ In the story, a dingo catches a wombat to make a stew, but the other bush animals trick him into adding gross ingredients like mud, feathers, flies, bugs, and gumnuts until he runs away.

Knowledge Rich

Over the past fortnight, students have explored weather and the four seasons: summer, autumn, winter and spring. They have learnt to identify the key features of each season, including changes in temperature, weather, plants and the environment. Students discussed how winter is often colder and wetter, spring brings warmer weather and new plant growth, summer is usually hotter with longer days, and autumn brings cooler weather and changes such as leaves changing colour and falling from trees. Students also explored how the seasons affect the clothes we wear, the activities we do and what we may notice in the world around us. Throughout the unit, students have developed their understanding that the four seasons occur in a repeating cycle throughout the year.

Did you know? When it is summer in Australia, it is winter in many countries in the Northern Hemisphere!

Preview- Our Preps will continue exploring the wonderful world of weather through stories, safety and science! We will read The Grasshopper and the Ants and uncover the important lessons hidden within the story as we think about the characters, their choices and what we can learn from them. We will then become storm safety experts and discover what to do when thunder, lightning and wild weather roll in.

We will also step into the shoes of meteorologists and become mini weather detectives! Students will explore how meteorologists observe, record and predict the weather, learn about forecasts and temperatures, and discover some of the clever tools used to keep track of changing conditions. We are looking forward to plenty of curious questions, new weather words and lots of budding meteorologists in Prep!

Maths

In Maths, we have been exploring capacity and investigating which containers can hold more or less. The students have loved getting hands-on with water, sand and Unifix cubes to fill and compare different containers. We have been making predictions, testing our ideas and using mathematical language such as more, less, full, empty and holds more/less to describe our findings. These practical experiences are helping students develop a strong understanding of measurement and capacity.

We have also started our new Maths unit on Sharing and Grouping. We are beginning to explore how we can share objects equally and make groups, using hands-on materials to help us represent and explain our thinking.

Preview- We are continuing learning about Sharing and Grouping, focusing on sharing into equal groups of two and three, with and without remainders.

Buddies and Science Week

This week, our Preps enjoyed catching up with their Grade 5 buddies for a fun outdoor scavenger hunt around the school. It was wonderful to see the students working together, searching for different colours, shapes, animals and objects while making the most of the slowly arriving sunshine! Our buddies showed fantastic teamwork, encouragement and excitement throughout the activity.

Science Week was also a big hit across the school! The rainbow Skittles experiment was a definite favourite, with students excitedly watching the colours spread and create beautiful rainbow patterns. It was fantastic to see so much curiosity, creativity and enthusiasm throughout all of the Science Week activities and classrooms. What a fun way to celebrate science and learning!

Myuna Farm

We had an amazing time at Myuna Farm! The students had the opportunity to feed the animals, milk goats, explore the veggie garden, plant their own seeds and ride a tractor to visit the local flying foxes.

Our Prep students showed wonderful school values throughout the day, particularly kindness and respect. They were caring towards the animals, respectful of the farm and considerate of each other. The teachers were so proud of the way they represented our school and enjoyed seeing everyone experience such a special day together.

Book Week

We had a fun book-filled day on Monday dressing up as our favourite book characters. Students loved looking around the school for all the Where's Wally Teacher characters!