Prep/1 Mainstream

It has been a very exciting few weeks moving into our new classrooms. Students have transitioned into the new routines with ease. Each morning, students will now line up downstairs in the allocated line up spot with their bags. They will bring their own bags upstairs and put them away in the designated spot. It has also been amazing to see our students taking care of the new yard space and staying out of the garden beds.

We have also been enjoying sharing our new classrooms with our 5/6 buddies. Students have explored building Lego creations and designing a unique construction using only purple paper. Students in all year levels have found it engaging in construction activities that support our investigations in discovery learning.

Literacy

Students are continuing to develop their phonological awareness through our phonics lessons, including sounding out words, reading fluency and spelling words. Students in Foundation are investigating long vowel patterns and are exploring the long e and long i spelling patterns. These have include ee (teeny green tree), ea (seals at the beach), y at the end of a word with two or more syllables (unhappy Molly) igh (lightning bright) and y at the end of a one syllable word (spy in the sky)

Year One students are currently reviewing stage 7.2 sounds, including /ar/or/er/air/ and their associated graphemes.

In Writing, students have continued to develop their understanding of non fiction texts. Students have been collecting information, grouping it into similar topics and writing sentences about the topic. Students have also completed a narrative writing task using a whole school writing prompt. Students were able to develop imaginative stories that included a beginning, middle and end. Students will continue to focus on their 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 have explored time, including the duration and sequencing of events, days of the week, months of the year and seasons, including european seasons and wurundjeri seasons. Please encourage your children to read O’Clock times at home to reinforce the role of the hour and minute hands.

Students are beginning to explore division through equal sharing and real life scenarios. They are dividing collections into equal and unequal groups and identifying numbers that can be shared equally into many equal groups (e.g. 12 can be equal groups of 2, 3, 4 and 6). They are also learning about arrays, including exploring the ways that rows and columns can help us count more efficiently and are also helpful for finding equal groups.

We encourage families to continue practising maths at home. Here are some simple games and activities that you might like to try:

Game 1: Addition or Subtraction 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: Turn it into Subtraction Snap by taking away the smallest number from the largest number to find the difference!

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!