Prep / 1 Mainstream

It’s hard to believe that we are already finishing up for the year!

We have celebrated the excellent work of Year F/1 students this week by having an icy pole at the park on Tuesday afternoon. We took some picnic blankets and sports equipment over the road after lunch and had a fun afternoon enjoying the sun.

On Thursday afternoon, we stayed nice and cool under the air conditioner and watched the movie, “Secret Life of Pets”.

To finish up our integrated unit on Living Things, our F/1 students have created a beautiful mural of animals, plants and habitats at the bottom of the F/1 ramp in celebration of all the knowledge we have shared this term. Make sure you have a look! We will be leaving this mural up as a gift to our new F/1 crew next year.

Maths:

These past two weeks we have reviewed some important concepts that students will take into next year. We’ve been playing lots of place value games to remind us how we can read and write two- and three-digit numbers.

This week, we used our data collection skills to decide on the movie that we would watch on Thursday. We were given three options to choose from. As a group, we voted for our favourite movie then created a graph to show our preference.

Writing:

We’ve spent the past few weeks developing our narrative plans. Now that we have a few plans to choose from, students have chosen the plan that they would like to turn into a draft. We’ve been really impressed to see how everyone is including all the different parts of their narrative plans in their draft!

Reading:

In fluency pairs, we have continued reading out loud to a partner and receiving feedback. This gives students the chance to notice how reading words accurately impacts their own and their partners' understanding of the text. A listening partner can assist their reading partner to read a word accurately by saying:

“That word is _____”
“What’s that word?”
“Good. Can you read that sentence again, please?”

We continue to practice paragraph shrinking in our classrooms to assist with reading comprehension. Paragraph shrinking helps build student understanding of the text and therefore improves fluency. Students are asked to “shrink” either a very short page or paragraph of the text by identifying who the text is mostly about and what the most thing is that has happened. Students then say the main idea in a sentence that is 10 words or less.

In our phonics groups over the past two weeks we have been focusing on the following sounds:

Rylee/ Anastasia and Jess have been learning:

/ay/ as in play and /ai/ as in pain.
/ee/ as in seed and /ea/ as in beach.

Matt was learning:

/i_e/ as in time
/i/ as in find
/igh/ as in light
/ie/ as in pie
/_y/ as in my

Steph was learning:

/kn/ as in know
/wr/ as in write
/gn/ as in gnome
/mb/ as in lamb

What can you be doing over the holidays to get ready for next year:

Our world is full of numbers. Cook with your child, look for shapes or arrays out in the wild and play any of the maths games that we have learnt this year.
If you are going away, it could be valuable for you to get your child to collect some souvenirs and write a journal about what they’ve seen and done. They can share this with their new class next year.
Continue reading over the holidays! Read to your child and get them to read to you. Our local libraries have an excellent resource bank of decodable readers that you can borrow. You can also access free online decodables through websites such as SPELD SA: https://speldsa.org.au/pages/speld-sa-phonic-books
Have a well deserved rest!!!!!!!

Warmly,

Anastasia, Jess and Rylee