Reading

Over the past two weeks in Reading, we have explored and unpacked all the parts of the picture story books: ‘Rose and Mr Wintergarten’ and ‘Boy’. At the start of each week, our students shared their existing knowledge about a key aspect of each story. Last week, this led to students creating their own scary, haunted house out of coloured paper. This week, our focus turned to crafting dragons, a main character in ‘Boy’. It was great to see students drawing upon their prior knowledge to deepen their understanding and establish connections with our focus texts.

Building on from Monday’s craft session, we made use of the pictures and title on the front cover of our focus text to predict what might happen. The students engaged with a transcribed version of the story and accompanying visuals. This was followed by drawing a sentence from the story.

Throughout the remainder of each week we looked at the beginnings, middles and ends of both stories, unpacking the characters, settings and the events that happened. Students practised substituting words within sentences, reading specific passages from the text and sequencing the parts of the story using pictures.

Writing

This past fortnight in Writing, the Preps have continued refining their grasp of uppercase and lowercase letters. We explored how both variations of a letter symbolise the same sound and we discussed situations in which uppercase letters are used. To illustrate this concept, students organised uppercase and lowercase letters, located uppercase letters in sentences and practised forming each version of these letters.

Throughout this term in Writing, our focus is on expanding students' writing skills by delving into rich texts. Each day, we introduce a new word from the text that may be unfamiliar to students and we engage in discussions to break down the meaning and sounds within the word. Over the past two weeks our “Words of the Day” were bristled, frightened, squeaked, uninviting, darting, rich, fierce, frantically, flabbergasted and chorused. Students were encouraged to incorporate these new words into sentences related to the beginning, middle, and end of the stories ‘Rose and Mr Wintergarten’ and ‘Boy’.

Maths

Last week in Maths, we learnt how to sort objects based on similar attributes such as colour, size and shape. We were very impressed with our Preps ability to sort fruits and vegetables into colours and then use this data to create their own simple bar charts!

This week in Maths, students have explored money and all the ways we can use money to purchase items and services. They loved seeing money in coins and notes and identifying the Australian animals on the coins. Students participated in a range of hands-on activities including coin rubbing, money puzzles and money bingo. At the end of the week, they had an opportunity to use their knowledge of money to go shopping. Our Preps did a wonderful job at being cashiers and customers!

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