Prep Community News
Dear Prep Families,
As Term 3 comes to a close, we can hardly believe how much our Prep students have grown and learnt! It has been a busy and exciting term filled with new discoveries, challenges, friendships and plenty of wonderful learning moments. We are incredibly proud of the progress each child has made and the enthusiasm they continue to bring to the classroom each day.
Below is an overview of the learning that has been taking place in Prep over the past fortnight!
InitiaLit
In InitiaLit, we have learned one more new sound! Students learnt about the letter ‘y’ and read words such as ‘yet’, ‘yes’, and ‘yak’.
As we have been coming to the end of the term, we have been reviewing all of the sounds that we have learnt along the way. We have also been continuing to practice reading and writing words with our digraphs: ‘ch’, 'sh’, ‘ee’, ‘ck’ along with double consonants 'll', 'ss', ‘ff.
It’s been so great to see our students experiment with these new sounds and digraphs in their own writing!
We have also been hard at work learning new tricky words! Tricky words are words that we can’t always sound out using the sounds we have learnt, so we need to learn how to read and write them off by heart. Below are our new tricky words that we have covered:
At home, you can support your child by:
- Practising reading and writing the new tricky words.
- Looking for words containing sh, ee, ch, zz, y, ll, ff, ss, ck when reading together.
- Encouraging your child to read their decodable readers every night.
Storybook
During Storybook lessons, we have been enjoying the story Click Clack Moo written by Doreen Cronin. We have been speaking about farm animals and what sort of things farms provide for us.
The vocabulary we have focused on for this story is:
Impatient – When you want something done right away
Furious – When you are very angry.
Demand – When you ask for something very strongly.
You can support your child by asking them to explain these words or use them in a sentence.
Writing
In Writing, students have continued to write informative texts about animals! We have been exploring informative texts by learning how authors share facts about a topic. As part of this learning, students have been writing simple factual sentences about fish and frogs, focusing on using capital letters, finger spaces, full stops and their growing phonics knowledge to spell unfamiliar words.
Maths
Over the past fortnight in Maths, we have been developing our understanding of subtraction and exploring a range of different strategies to help us solve problems. We have practised counting back from a given number and have used drawing lines as a visual strategy to help us work out the difference between numbers.
We have also been learning how to write numbers that end in -ty such as twenty, thirty and forty. We have been learning that our -ty numbers must end in a zero because they all have zero ones.
We have continued to practice our fact fluency by solving as many simple addition problems as we can in two minutes. We have now included adding zero to a number as well as adding one and two.
You can support your child at home by practicing counting back by one to solve these subtraction problems:
- 9 - 0 =
- 7 - 2 =
- 6 - 1 =
- 8 – 3 =
Celebrating Growth
In Prep, we love recognising students who consistently demonstrate our school values. Over the past fortnight, each Prep class has celebrated one student who has done an outstanding job at demonstrating the school value of Growth inside and outside the classroom.
🌟 Prep A: Abdullah has challenged himself when writing sentences. He has been working hard to write two or more ideas and use his letter-sound knowledge to write unfamiliar words.
🌟 Prep B: Dhruvi has shown a lot of growth in her maths! She is doing an amazing job with her addition fluency questions and attempts difficult problems with a positive attitude!
🌟 Prep C: Vikraan has been using his letter, sound and tricky word knowledge to create an amazing information report about frogs and writing this independently for the first time.
🌟 Prep D: Noel has been showing so much growth with his learning this term. He has become more independent and is able to read and write CVC words on his own!
🌟 Prep E: Justin demonstrates the school value of Growth by consistently putting effort into his classwork, persevering with tasks and working towards completing his work on time.
🌟 Prep F: Vivaan has demonstrated our school Value of Growth by consistently trying his best with his writing and applying his letter-sound knowledge to independently encode words.
🌟 Prep G: Virat Joshi: For showing consistent improvement in his learning and growing confidence in tackling challenging tasks.
🌟 Prep H: Khadija has been working so hard in Maths using the counting back strategy to solve subtraction problems. She never gives up even when something might be tricky.
🌟 Prep I: Bobby-Ray has been growing in resilience both in the classroom and in the yard.
🌟 Prep J: Anaya has been working extremely hard in writing and is showing a fantastic attitude towards her learning. She is always so eager to learn, participate and have a go at new things, which is such a wonderful quality to see in the classroom.
We are incredibly proud of these students for displaying our school value of Growth each day. Their actions help make Prep a safe and happy experience for all students and teachers. Well done to all our Growth champions!
General Reminders
Reading at Home
Reading regularly at home is one of the best ways to support your child's literacy development. Even 10–15 minutes each evening reading together, practising decodable readers or talking about stories helps build confidence and fluency.
Please remember to send your child's reading satchel or red reading bag to school on their designated reading day so they can exchange their take-home readers and library books.
Labelling Belongings
Please ensure that all clothing, lunch boxes, drink bottles and personal belongings are clearly labelled with your child's name and class. This helps lost items quickly find their way back to their owners.
School Times
Students begin entering classrooms from 8:45 am to unpack and prepare for the day. Learning begins promptly at 8:55 am, so arriving on time helps students settle in and make the most of every learning opportunity. School finishes and students are dismissed at 3:10 pm.
As we head into the holidays, we hope the children are looking forward to a well-deserved break and some time to rest, recharge and enjoy special moments with family. Thank you for your continued support throughout the term. See you on Monday the 5th of October ready to start our last term of learning!🌈📚✨
PLC Prep