Classroom News

Foundation News

Can you believe that we are nearly at the end of Term 1?! As we wrap up our first term of school, we want to take a moment to celebrate our amazing Foundation students! We are so proud of how well they have settled into school life, embraced new learning experiences, and adapted to classroom routines with enthusiasm and confidence.

From making new friends to exploring letters and numbers, and participating in a range of specialist classes, each child has shown incredible growth. Their resilience, curiosity, and eagerness to learn have been truly inspiring! They continue to demonstrate these attributes whilst attending their first excursion this week, swimming! They are absolutely loving being in the pool, albeit a little tired on their return everyday, but like the resilient group they are, our learning continues.

Literacy

Students have continued to learn many new phonemes including  /g/, /o/, /b/, /h/, /e/, /r/, /f/, /u/ and /l/ and have been working hard to segment and blend sounds to read words and sentences with these phonemes. We have focused on the letter formation of these new phonemes and have used these new skills to create our own sentences, describing a ‘who’ and a ‘what’. It has been wonderful to see their excitement as they apply these skills to their reading and writing!

Maths

In Mathematics, students have been exploring the numbers 0-5 through hands-on activities where they have created collections to match the numeral. They have been learning to compare collections using the words “more” and “less,” and have begun identifying that numbers can be made up of parts to create a whole. We look forward to continuing to explore numbers and introduce students to new skills such as subitising.

Future Learning 

Soon you will see students begin their take home reader journey. We have developed the routine of students bringing their satchel to school, changing their book over and writing their readers into their diary. As students begin this journey, we anticipate it will be a learning experience for both students and parents and we are here to support both students and parents through this! Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about how to best support your child.

P.E. with Mr. Arnold

Term 1 has been action-packed in P.E. with plenty of exciting activities and skill-building for our students!

We kicked off the term with a focus on athletics for the first four weeks. The students worked hard to improve their skills in running, long jump, triple jump, high jump, and shot put as they prepared for our upcoming school athletics carnival next week. It’s been great to see everyone’s progress and dedication in fine-tuning these skills!

After athletics, we moved on to a 3-week tennis unit, where students learned the basics of the sport, including forehands, backhands, volleys, and serves. By the end of the unit, they were able to play proper tennis matches, using scoring and applying all the techniques they had mastered. 

Last week we had some crazy weather in some of our classes, so we went inside and played some crab soccer which the students loved, showing enthusiasm as they cheered for their teammates to score goals. 

To wrap up this term, we’ll be revisiting some of the athletics skills from earlier in the term and playing a few fun games to end on a high note. It’s been a fantastic term of learning, teamwork, sportsmanship and getting to know all the students at Teesdale Primary School!

I'm looking forward to the rest of the year and all the fun P.E. activities ahead!

Thanks,

Mr Arnold