What's Happening in the Junior School

 Prep

What’s Happening in Prep in May

We hope everyone had a well-deserved holiday and enjoyed Easter with their families. It has been lovely hearing about what the Prep’s got up to over the break. We are looking forward to another fun-filled term filled with lots of rich learning opportunities. Over the past couple of weeks, the Preps have been getting back into learning routines and reconnecting with their peers. 

Wellbeing

• Revising classroom and school expectations
• Working together as a team. 
• Sharing and taking turns
• Listening to others’ ideas
• Being kind when we work with others

• Solving problems together

   

Literacy

• Practising CVC, CCVC, CVCC words
• Learning the consonants /k/ kite, h /hat/ /r/ rat, /l/ lamp, /w/ wagon, /j/ jam, /y/ yellow 
• Recognising consonant r and l blends
• Identifying nouns and verbs in a sentence

• Writing sentences with a who (nouns), do (verbs) and where and what (noun)

   

Maths

• Partitioning numbers to 5 into two parts and three parts 
• Identifying the parts and the whole in numbers to 5
• Partitioning numbers to 10 into two parts and three parts 
• Identifying the parts and the whole in numbers to 10
• Subitising parts within numbers to 5 and to 10
• Identifying how many more to make numbers to 5 and to 10
• Making number pairs to 5
• Making number pairs to 10
• Making numbers up to 10 from smaller numbers

• Making 10 from smaller parts

   

Knowledge Unit

Focus: Science and Design and Technology

Big question: How might we reuse materials to make products and sounds?

• What is a product?
• What are products made from?
• What sounds do different materials make?
• What materials can be recycled and reused?

Specialist

Please find below a timetable of when your child/ren 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

• Tuesday 5th May (WK 3)- Whole School Cross Country
• Friday 8th May (WK 3) - Mother’s Day Open Afternoon. 
• Thursday 14th May (WK 4) - Prep-2 Cake Bake Competition (See Compass for details)
• Wednesday 20th May (WK 5)- Walk to Beaumaris Library number 1 (further details to come)
• Wednesday 27th May (WK 6)- Walk to Beaumaris Library number 2 (further details to come)
• Thursday 28th May (WK 6) – Performing Arts Dance Incursion (please see Compass event)

Year 1

What’s Happening in Year 1 in May 

Welcome back Year 1 students! We hope you had a wonderful and restful Easter break. We have an exciting Term 2 ahead of us.  

Wellbeing 

The Year 1’s will continue to participate in the Zones of Regulation program and focus on building our resilience skills. We will be understanding personal triggers that can cause us to become dysregulated and develop strategies to manage these triggers to get closer to the Green Zone. These strategies will be collated in our Zones of Regulation Toolkits. We will also explore common worries and identify body symptoms of these worries. Lastly, we will develop personal strategies to overcome and manage these worries. 

Literacy 

The Year 1 students will be working through the UFLI structured, synthetic phonics program. During this time, they will focus on developing their phonics knowledge, decoding skills, and confidence as early readers. The children will engage enthusiastically with new sounds and patterns this month, including the FLOSS rule, -ck and common consonant digraphs and will begin applying these skills to their reading and writing. We will continue with our fluency reading, focusing on reading with accuracy, reading rates, and using expression when reading. Students continue working on practising tall letters in handwriting, focusing on correctly forming the letters F, H, D, B and K in both uppercase and lowercase. 

Language and Literature 

The Year 1 students will be engaging with the text Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox. We will explore the theme of family, which students are also learning about in our Knowledge Unit.Students will focus on sentence level writing, where they will write and edit their own sentences. Using the mentor text, students will learn about narrative text structure as well as exploring the purpose of the text. Students will also have opportunities to showcase their writing in a range of ways. 

Maths 

The Year 1 students will continue to work on developing their numeracy skills within our structured Number Fluency Program. The Number Fluency Program focuses on accuracy and speed, with the students participating in a 'Skill Check' with their teacher every week to monitor their progress. We will also be investigating units of measurement. In the first topic we will be developing skills in understanding and ordering a variety of lengths, and objects of different masses and capacities. We will be using a variety of hands-on materials to measure both formally and informally. We will then be examining the passage of time and how to sequence and measure time and duration via the use of timetables and clocks.   

Knowledge Unit 

Our curriculum focus for our Knowledge Unit in Term 2 is History. We are exploring the ways everyday life has changed from the 19th century to today. Students will look at past, present & future, family stories, how school and family life has changed over time, what has stayed the same and how we can connect with the past. Look out for an ‘Interview Booklet’ that will come home shortly. Students will be asked to interview a family member or family friend from a different generation to gain an insight into everyday differences and experiences over time.  

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: 

Sun Protection 

Your child must wear their hat every day. They are to stay at school in your child’s tub. Classroom sunscreen is provided, however, if they require a specific sunscreen it needs to be packed in their bag daily. Students will continue to wear their hats at recess and lunch in Term 2, until the UV level drops below 3.  

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. We encourage students to read each reader at least twice during the week. 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. 

Year 2

What’s Happening in Year 2 in May 

The Year 2’s enjoyed the Term 1 incursion, finishing off our unit on Space! Please see some photos of our time in the Space Dome. We were so impressed with their incredible Space books and how hard they worked on them. 

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

Wellbeing

• Identifying and practicing fairness in games and play.
• How to be a good friend / classmate

• Regulation strategy: Stop, Think, Go

   

Phonics

• r-controlled vowels (ar, or, ore, er)

• vowel teams (ai, ay, ee, ea, oa, ow, oe, ie, igh, oo)

   

Literacy

• Answer comprehension questions about our mentor text ‘The Fabulous Friend Machine’.
• Summarising the events of our mentor text.
• Narrative mapping our mentor text.
• Writing simple sentences and expanding sentences to include more details.

Maths

• Identifying suitable informal units to measure length
• Measure, compare and estimate the length of objects using informal units
• Use doubles and near doubles to solve addition and subtraction problems
• Use two-digit number fact families to solve addition and subtraction problems
• Mentally solve addition and subtraction problems using partitioning

• Use base ten materials and number lines to answer two-digit addition and subtraction problems with and without regrouping

   

Knowledge Unit

This term, the Year 2 students will be learning about Geography. We will be exploring two topics: Where are we in the World? And How do First Nations People connect to Country and Place? 

This month we will be:

• Labelling and identifying continents, countries, cities and suburbs
• Identifying different Australian bodies of water
• Identifying different Australian ecosystems
• Identify the Indigenous names for Australian cities
• Identify the traditional land we live on.

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 who have mastered the code, will bring home a short chapter book which they can read across the week. 

In addition, each student will bring home one quality text (fiction or non-fiction) from their classroom library each week. As novice readers, they will not necessarily be able to read these books independently. However, they will benefit a great deal from hearing these texts read out loud by an expert (you!).

Reminders:

• Whole School Cross Country will take place on Tuesday 5th of May at Dendy Park. Prep to Year 3 will be out from 9.10am to 12pm. Please consent and pay for your child at your earliest convenience.
• Mothers’ Day stall will be held on Wednesday 6th of May. Please see Compass communication regarding this event.
• The Year 2 Cranbourne Botanic Gardens Incursion will occur on Monday 18th May. Please consent and pay for your child at your earliest convenience