Prep/1 Mainstream

This fortnight, students have been exploring Earth and Space through role play and other creative endeavours. We went to the park and used our bodies and a trundle wheel to model the (scaled) distances between the sun and each of the planets. We discovered that Mercury, Venus and Earth seemed pretty close to the sun, whereas Neptune was all the way on the other side of the park! We have also been creating our very own solar system mobiles using carefully selected colours and textures to reflect the different planets.

Last week, we celebrated book week. It was wonderful to see so many amazing costumes! Well done to all the students who entered the writing and illustration competitions, we really enjoyed reading all of your stories. It was so difficult to choose a winner! Next week at assembly, we will find out the winning classroom door design. This will be based on each class voting for their favourite door.

Next week, the F-2 classes will attend swimming lessons. In class, we explained to students through a social story how these sessions will run next week and students had the opportunity to ask questions. Please also keep an eye out for Compass communications regarding this.

Literacy

In Reading, students will continue to focus on phonics, including sounding out words, reading fluency and spelling words. Students in both Foundation and Year One are revising spelling patterns with a spelling word list. Students in Foundation have begun looking at ‘ph’ and ‘wh’ (Elephants and dolphins. Where are the whales?). Year One students have been looking at ‘ar’ as in smart, ‘a’ as in fast and ‘al’ as in half.

In Writing, students continue to focus on developing their writing stamina. They have begun looking at story writing, making sure there is a beginning, middle and end to their stories. They have also looked at characters and settings in a story. Students will continue to focus on the following secretarial skills:

Writing the sounds they hear in each word
Starting a sentence with a capital letter
Putting a finger space between each word
Ending a sentence with a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark.
Forming letters correctly

Maths

In Mathematics, students are exploring ways to collect, sort and interpret data. They have been using tally marks and tables to sort information, then transferring this into a bar graph model. We have explored language related to data representation, such as ‘scale, categories, increment, interval, most, and least’. This has been a great way to get to know more about each other, exploring and generating questions such as:

“What is your favourite fruit?”

“How many pets do you have?”

“What is your favourite game to play?”

What is some data that might be useful to collect in or around your home?

How many items do we recycle each day over the course of a week?

Who has the longest showers in our house on average (measuring in minutes)?

Here are some games and activities that you might like to try at home:

Game 1: Kolap

An Australia Indigenous game traditionally played with seed pods from trees.

You will need at least two players, two hoops (or drawn circles), and 5 small objects (beanbags, sticks of a similar size or natural materials).

Player 1 stands approximately 5 metres from the hoop (increase or decrease this depending on throwing ability). They throw each of their objects to land in the hoop.
Record how many of your objects land in the hoop using tally marks.
Player 2 has a turn. They then record tally marks for the number of successful throws into the hoop.
Repeat approximately 5 times each, count the tally marks, then create a bar graph to show who threw the most objects into the hoop.
The player with the longest bar is the winner!

Challenge: What would your bar graph look like if two tally marks was equal to one increment on your scale?

Game 2: Tens or Hundred Facts Memory!

This is an easy and fun game to play on your own or with a partner. Remove the picture cards from your card deck. Ace is worth 1.

Spread all of your cards out and place them face down.
Turn over any two cards at a time and try to find as many sets of ten as you can! Eg. 9 and 1, 8 and 2, 7 and 3, etc.

Challenge: Pretend each card is a multiple of ten (eg. 9 = 90). How many hundreds facts can you find?

See if you can record ALL of the number sentences for your tens and hundreds facts!

Game 3: Addition Snap!

This is an easy and fun game to play with a partner. Remove the picture cards from your deck. Ace is worth 1.

Divide your cards into two piles face down. One for your partner and one for you.
Say “Ready, set, go!” Both partners place a card from their own pile down in the middle. The first person to add the cards together keeps the set.
Repeat until all cards are gone. The person with the most cards at the end is the winner!

Challenge: Pretend the cards are multiples of ten. 6 + 3 becomes 60 + 30.