What's Happening in the Junior School
Prep
What’s Happening in Prep in Weeks 3 and 4
What a great start to Term 2 the Preps have had! We have jumped straight back into our learning, recognising new sounds and blending consonants together when reading longer words. We are all so excited about celebrating 50 Days of Prep! What an achievement.
Wellbeing
- Demonstrating and understanding the school values (Respect, Resilience, Responsibility and Relationships)
Literacy
- Practising CVC, CCVC, CVCC words
- Learning the consonants /l/ lamp, in a consonant blend e.g pl, gl, sl, /w/ wagon, /j/ jam and /y/ yellow
- Identifying and using nouns and verbs in a sentence
Maths
- Identifying the parts and the whole in numbers to 10
- Partitioning numbers to 5 into three parts
- Partition numbers to 10 into three parts
- Subitise parts within numbers to 5
Knowledge Unit
Big Question: How are we part of a community?
Over the next fortnight, students will be exploring the following lines of inquiry:
- What is a community?
- Who and what is in the community?
- What are the community essentials?
Homework
Students take home 3 decodable readers in their reading pouch each week as well as their green Decoding Detective book and Sound Pack. Please continue to read these with your child, the Preps love showing you how they can recognise and recall all learnt letters and sounds. Reading pouches are returned on Mondays to be changed over and checked by their teacher.
Reminders
- Prep ‘Half Day’ – Tuesday 6th May
- Prep Dance Incursion – Wednesday 7th May
- Mother’s Day Open Afternoon – Friday 9th May
- Japanese Day - Tuesday 13th May
Year 1
What’s Happening in Year 1 in Weeks 3 and 4
Wellbeing
In wellbeing students will be creating individualised ‘Zones of Regulation’ toolkits to support them with their learning and in the school yard by identifying strategies to assist them in moving into the green zone. Students will also be recognising and identifying their own emotions and discuss appropriate emotional responses.
Literacy
Students will be working on:
- Phonics: Using ‘Superhero e’ at the end of words to change the short vowel sound to a long sound
- As our phonics lessons teach new digraphs and diphthongs, sound pack cards will be added to the students’ reading pouches for practice at home
- Reading Fluency: Reading with accuracy and appropriate rate
- Handwriting: Correctly forming tall letters i.e. Hh, Dd
- Writing sentences and correctly using capital letters, punctuation and finger spacing
- Weekend recount writing
- Narrative writing and looking at the story elements of characters, setting, and plot
Maths
Students will be working on:
- Compare and order events based on duration of time
- Sequencing events over a day
- Matching events and activities to time and deciding whether they would take closer to an hour, a day, a week, a month or a year
- Addition
- Subtraction
Knowledge Unit
Using our family interview and prompts shared in the classroom, students will be sharing and comparing how our families and activities our families have participated in have changed over time. Students will be exploring terms such as generation, past, present and future.
Take Home Readers
Each week, your child will take three decodables home. 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. In addition, students are bringing home one quality text 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!).
As our phonics lessons teach new digraphs and diphthongs, sound pack cards will be added to the students’ reading pouches for practice. Keep practicing the sound pack cards the students already have.
Mathletics
Your child now has their Mathletics code pasted into their Homework Diaries. Activities have been set by the classroom teachers. Mathletics tasks will be set each Wednesday by your classroom teacher. Each week we will continue to set maths tasks for students to work through at their own pace, if desired. Completing these tasks is optional. We have been really excited to see students completing Mathletics tasks at home. These help to consolidate their understandings from the classroom.
Reminders
- Fruit and veggie break snack: Please ensure that students are bringing their fruit and veggie snack in a container separate to their lunch box. This supports students in transitioning during fruit and veggie break time in the classroom.
- Students are to bring in their reading pouch every Monday to swap their take home readers and classroom library book. It is really important students are completing their 20 minutes of nightly reading to support their reading progress. New readers are only sent home until the previous week’s books have been returned.
- Family interview booklet is to be returned by Friday 9th May. Please also include a photo of your special person.
- If you haven’t already done so, please provide headphones for your child to use and keep at school.
Year 2
What’s Happening in Year 2 in Weeks 3 and 4
We have had a fantastic few weeks back at school with the Year 2’s diving straight into our new Geography Unit! We have been learning about where we are geographically located in the world and what makes a place special to us. Yesterday, we attended a local walk to Long Hollow Heathland, exploring native plants and learning about elements of our local community.
Over the next fortnight, the Year 2 students will be learning:
Wellbeing
Reviewing the zones of regulations
- identifying strategies that can be used to regulate from the Blue Zone to the Green Zone
- identifying strategies that can be used to regulate from the Yellow Zone to the Green Zone
Phonics
- Reviewing ‘r-controlled vowels’
- Learning /ai/ and /ay diagraphs
- Learning ee, ea, ey diagraphs
- Learning oa, ow, oe diagraphs
Literacy
- Writing sentences with adverbs.
- Developing questioning sentences.
- Reading our new mentor text ‘Ella and the Ocean’.
- Answering comprehension questions about texts.
- Engaging in Readers theatre to explore character development.
- Making connections between texts and ourselves.
Maths
- Review rounding three-digit numbers to the nearest 10 and 100 and 1000
- Identifying suitable informal units of measurement for length
- Measuring the lengths of objects and shapes using informal units
- Comparing and ordering the length of objects using informal units
- Estimating the length of objects and measure with informal units to check
Knowledge Unit
This term, the Year 2 students will be learning about Geography. We will be exploring the big question: How do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people connect to Country and Place?
Over the next fortnight, students will be exploring the following lines of inquiry:
- What places are special to us?
- What is our place in the world (local, city, state, country, continent)?
- What are the features of my special place that help me connect to it?
- How do different people connect to different places? (Physically, emotionally, historically, geographically)
- How do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people demonstrate their connections to Country and place?
Homework
- Please continue to read the take home reading books each week, aiming for 15 – 20 minutes each evening. Changing readers will continue to occur on a Friday.
- Please enjoy sharing a new Classroom Library text each Friday. This book is for enjoyment and can be read by parents/carers.
- Optional: Mathletics logins have been placed in the front cover of reading diaries. Students may work through these tasks at their own pace, if desired.
Reminders:
- Mother's Day - Open Afternoon: Friday 2:45pm
- Year 2 Excursion to Cranbourne Botanical Gardens: Monday 19th May. Please see information provided via Compass.
- Japanese Day: Tuesday 13th May
