Foundation News

Remote Learning

It has been pleasing to see students in Foundation motivated and actively engaged during Zoom meetings these past 2 weeks. All students are continuing to build their ICT skills and are independently able to login, mute and unmute themselves, as well as log out of meetings.

Assigned tasks are now completed in a timely manner by the majority of students, and it is great to see so many children complete work to the best of their ability. We appreciate many parents are juggling work with supervising their children at home. For this reason, each daily schedule is posted the day prior to tasks having to be complete. This ensures parents are aware of upcoming tasks and can prepare resources and have discussions with their child ahead of time.

Reading

Each day, just like at school, students are expected to commence reading at home by viewing/reading a specific shared text. Recently for example, the children read the book 'Stanley Paste' written by our focus author Aaron Blabey. Each day, students focus on and complete work based a particular reading skill. Skills relate to meaning (what the text is about), visual (letters and words in a text) and structure (grammar). Here are a couple of examples of recently completed work:

Writing

As part of our Inquiry topic " What Makes a Community", students identified people, services and groups that exist in their local community. Students have been encouraged to learn and recite their home address, in case of an emergency. Recently students explained what it's like living in their neighbourhood. Now more than ever, it is important for children to recognise the way people in communities support, help and band together on a daily basis and during challenging times. Even one person's contribution can make a difference!

Maths-The Sequence for Developing the Addition Concept

In Foundation, addition is introduced through verbal action stories that involve joining. For example, "There were 4 ducks on the pond. 3 more ducks flew to the pond to join them. How many ducks are on the pond now?

The children are guided in using materials to show these addition situations. Students set out objects and the addition algorithm vertically. For example:

Using every day materials to solve addition stories

Using favourite objects to solve addition number stories

Gradually, symbols are introduced to represent this process, matching + to the joining process through careful development eg:

4 4 4

3 and 3 + 3 4 add 3 is 7

7 7 7

It is important that children can match stories/materials/symbols. Emphasis is placed on the part/part/whole aspect of addition eg:

part

whole

Finally, it is important that the children's addition language is extended by building in alternative expressions that mean or imply 'add'.

By following the steps above enables students to fully understand what addition means in a real life context. It also gives students a solid understanding of addition so that they can build on their skills based on this concept in future years.

Wellbeing Wednesday

Last Wednesday students were given the opportunity to complete specialist tasks and participate in wellbeing activities. As remote learning continues, we will give the children opportunities to connect with their classmates via Zoom and also have a little bit of fun. Last week students in FL were set the task of dressing up their Raph bear (or favourite toy) as a reflection of themselves. It was great to hear children excitedly share their individual personalities. Students in FP took part in drawing a blind self-portrait that was revealed at the end, and a scavenger hunt. It was fantastic to see and hear the excitement in each of the students!