What's Happening in the Junior School

Prep

What’s Happening in Prep in March

Over the past few weeks, our Preps have had a wonderful time settling into school life and enjoying many special learning experiences. We enjoyed a very special Teddy Bear Picnic with our Year 6 buddies, where the students shared a picnic, built connections and had lots of fun together. During this time, we also began learning how to read and write CVC words, and the students are showing great enthusiasm and growing confidence as they practise these new skills. Throughout these weeks, we have continued to focus on our school values of respect, relationships, resilience and responsibility. It has been lovely to see the children demonstrating these values each day through making new friends, giving everything at school a go, and taking care of their own belongings. 

Wellbeing

• Introducing the Zones of Regulation 
• Creating a personal Zones of Regulation toolkit 

• Recognising our emotions through picture story books

   

Literacy

• Recognising and writing the short vowel sounds /i/ itchy /o/ olive /u/ up
• Recognising and writing consonants p, f, n, d, c, g
• Reading and writing Vowel Consonant (VC) and Consonant Vowel Consonant (CVC) words
• Identifying and defining nouns and verbs 
• Recognising the ‘who, ‘do’ and ‘what’ in sentences

• Identifying the characters and settings in a story.

   

Maths

• Counting forwards and backwards to 10
• Carefully counting a collection of objects
• Matching quantities with their numerals to 10
• Subitising collections 0-10
• Representing numbers on a tens frame
• Adding one more to a collection (0-10)

• Reading and writing numerals 0-10

   

Knowledge Unit

Focus: History – Our families

Big question: How are families similar and different across the world. 

• Identifying different traditions
• Exploring different cultures and cultural traditions 

• Recognising the difference between different families, traditions and cultures

   

Specialist

Please find below a timetable of when your child/rens class will attend specialist. In coming weeks, students will be creating their own timetable to bring home. 

Home Reading Program

Over Weeks 5–8, students will begin bringing home their brand-new reading pouch (blue BPS satchel). Inside the pouch, you will find a notice explaining how to use the reading pouch and the different reading resources included. 

To start, your child will bring home:

• Three decodable readers
• One picture storybook labelled Classroom Library

As the term progresses, we will also add:

• A green “Decoding Detective” workbook

• Your child’s own sound pack cards

   

These additional 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. 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. Thank you for supporting your child’s reading journey at home!

Reminders

• Family photo for our family wall in the Prep hallway
• If you haven’t done so already, please send your child along with their Art Smock - these stay at school for the year 
• Prep students will attend school full-time from Monday 2nd March
• Open afternoon – Friday 13th March 
• Labor Day – Monday 9th March 
• Curriculum Day (no students) - Tuesday 10th March

Year 1

What’s Happening in Year 1 in March 

Welcome to Year 1! 

The students have made a very positive start to the year and are already settling well into classroom routines. It has been lovely getting to know them and seeing their enthusiasm for learning. 

Wellbeing 

The Year 1s will continue to participate in the Zones of Regulation program. We have been identifying lots of different emotions and what zones they may fit into. Our next step is to gain awareness of how we identify the signals in our body about the emotions we are feeling and the zones we may be in. We will also be understanding personal triggers and developing strategies to manage these triggers to get closer to the Green Zone. These strategies will be collated in our Zones of Regulation Toolkits. We understand that our toolkits will be individual and might look different to others in our class. Please talk to your children about their feelings and emotions and what zone they may be in to reinforce these concepts. 

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 exploring the text A Year on Our Farm by Penny Matthews and Andrew McLean. We will explore themes of seasons, change that comes with seasons and connection to nature. Students will explore sentence level writing, where they will write and edit their own sentences. Using the mentor text, students will be learning about narrative text structure and informative text elements as well as exploring the purpose of the text. Students will identify and understand descriptive vocabulary in the text, such as emerged. 

Maths 

This month, our Year 1 students are starting a school-wide number fluency program. This program runs alongside our Maths curriculum. It is a differentiated program designed to build accuraccy and fluency in a variety of foundational Maths skills. We will also be continuing to practise the skills of regrouping and renaming numbers, comparing and ordering 2-digit numbers, and locating numbers on a 100 and 120 number chart.  

Knowledge Unit 

The students have had a great start to our Knowledge Unit: Farm to Family. We have looked at the technical drawing skills of sketching and diagrams. We have identified the Design Process of “Identifying Problems, Designing Solutions, Creating and Testing Prototypes, and Improving Designs”, and have had a chance to work through it. Over the next month we are going to explore foods that come from plants and animals and investigate items that are designed and produced from fibres sourced from plants and animals. Finally, they will understand how raw materials can be turned into finished products that solve problems for humans. 

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 

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 

   

Fruit Snack 

Every morning at 9.55am students will have a fruit snack. Children must have their fruit/veggie snack in a separate smaller container to their lunch.  

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.  
• Myuna Farm Our Year 1 excursion to Myuna Farm is Thursday 12th March. 1M is still looking for one more parent help for the day. The link to sign up ishere.  

Year 2

What’s Happening in Year 2 in March 

What a fabulous first few weeks of Year 2 we have had, kicking off the year with our swimming program. The Year 2s have impressed us with their determination in swimming lessons and in looking after their belongings. We have been thoroughly enjoying our Science lessons, learning all about Space – we have even used Oreos to learn about the phases of the Moon! 

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

Wellbeing 

• Review the zones of regulation and identify the body clues for each zone

• Identify our personal strengths and what makes us unique 

   

Phonics 

• Review ‘Superhero E’ 
• Read and write words with –es, –ed and –ing suffix endings 
• Review words with open and closed syllables 

• Read and write words with long spellings –tch and –dge 

   

Literacy 

• Answer comprehension questions and writing a response to the mentor text ‘Bunyip and the Stars’
• Edit sentences for punctuation 
• Use conjunctions: but, so and because
• Begin to write an informative paragraph about a planet

Maths 

• Review telling time to the hour and half-hour on analogue clocks 
• Identify clockwise and anticlockwise turns of different sizes 
• Use calendars to identify days, dates and how many days, weeks and months between dates 
• Categorise data in lists and use lists to create data tables 
• Use various strategies to add and subtract within 20 including bridging through ten, using tens frames, number lines and MAB blocks 

• Add and subtract one and two-digit numbers using partitioning 

   

Knowledge Unit 

This term, the Year 2 students will be learning about Earth Sciences. We will be exploring the big question: Where is earth within the solar system and how do changes in the Sun, Moon and stars affect our daily lives? 

 Over the next month, students will be exploring the following lines of inquiry: 

• How does the Moon influence our Earth? 
• What are the different phases of the Moon?  
• What are star constellations? 
• How do First Nations Peoples of Australia use patterns in the changing positions of the stars to inform their daily lives? 

Home Reading Program  

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 

The Year 2 Space Dome Incursion will occur on Friday 27th March. 

Please consent and pay for your child at your earliest convenience.