Prep to Grade 2: 

Prep/1A

This fortnight, the children were super excited to take a deep dive into the stage 3 letters and sounds! We have been learning all about the phonemes /y/, /r/ and /e/ and their corresponding graphemes. In our sound box, we have explored some of the things that start with these sounds, building our vocabulary and knowledge of words. 

We have also enjoyed two wonderful picture story books and used these to springboard our writing activities. Both these books appear on the Premier’s Reading Challenge list, and we have added them to each student’s profile! We are making wonderful progress in this endeavour! As a class, we have read 20 Premier’s Reading Challenge books - not to mention all the stories the children loan from the library each week to enjoy at home!

In math we have been exploring common 2D shapes including their names, sides and vertices. We’ve also started our class project for the Maths Talent Quest, titled ‘Playground Maths’! In the coming weeks, we will be exploring a range of mathematical concepts (shape, measurement, time, number) in the sandpit, playground and various activities located throughout wonderful school grounds. 

We started with a shape hunt around the playground and found so many different shapes! We took a tally of them and graphed our results.

It was a wonderful treat for the students to welcome some very special 'grown up' visitors to our module on Monday! Grade 3/4 students have buddied up with each of the Prep/1A students over the past few weeks to design and build a 'toy' that they could take home and enjoy. I've included some photos here - check out the grade 3-6 page for all the details! 

Finally, we have some very important upcoming events in early term 3 that you may want to get down into your diary: 

Week 4 - 100 days of Prep (Tuesday 6th August)

Week 5 - Milo Monkey letters and sounds celebration (date TBC)

Week 6 - Book week and walking excursion to Monash Library (Friday 23rd August)

1/2 A

In Literacy this fortnight, grade 1s have been busy reading and writing with 4 new graphemes-  oo, le, ow, and ou. 

Grade 2s have learned and applied the suffix -ous and have been focussing on questioning and summarising short novels.

For Writing, we've been publishing our fairy bread procedures and are finishing up the term working with a fabulous picture story book 

"TOO LOUD Lily".

In Maths we've had a blast with our mini money unit, and made a start on our Maths Talent Quest Project.

Inquisitive Minds

It's been an exciting fortnight in Inquisitive Minds for the junior module! As we continue to embark on our new unit in Design Technologies, we explored the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating. Each student designed a family meal, and aimed to include a range of ingredients from each of the five healthy food groups. We then used salt dough to construct a model of our family meal, and evaluated how well it met our criteria for taste, visual appeal, and healthiness. This was a lot of fun for the students! 

This week, we were fortunate to have PrimeSci from Swinburn University of Technology, visit and present a hands-on physics incursion that explored forces and motion through the properties of toys! We were so grateful for this wonderful opportunity – the children had a lot of fun and learnt so many things about push and pull, friction, gravity, tension and torque. The children made a rotocoptor and explored how magnets attract and repel.