Prep

Hello Prep families!

The prep students have well and truly settled into classroom routines and are enjoying learning about lots of new topics. We are so proud of how eager they are to learn and how excited they are to come to school each day.

We have been working on making new friends by asking people to play with us outside. We are using our 'Places We Can Play' poster to make a plan on where we will play and with who. We are also making new friends during Investigations time, where all the preps have a chance to work together and explore various spaces, having lots of fun in the process.

The students had a lovely visit with their buddies last week. They read books together, and learnt new facts about one another. It was wonderful to see so many smiling faces!

The preps have also been enjoying PMP! This is a chance for them to practise their gross motor skills by doing lots of fun activities.

House Colours:

Next week your child will find out the house they are in, in preparation for Athletics Day. Keep an eye out for a paper wrist band that will come home on their arm telling them what house colour/name they are in next week. This will be made as a reminder for your child so they don't forget (you can keep them at home).

Important dates:

- Wednesday 26th February – School Photo Day

- Friday 7th March - Curriculum Day

- Monday 10th March - Labour Day Public Holiday

- Thursday 20th March - School Athletics Day

- Friday 4th April - Last day of Term, students 2pm finish

Note: Please keep an eye on Compass for any important information that may be shared.

Kindest regards,

The Prep Team

Laina Brebner, Kayla Hartrick and Emma Wright

Grade 1

Hello Grade 1 families and special people. Thanks for all you do for your little learners and for checking in on their learning! Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve been up to.

In Reading, we’ve been following up on our predictions about a book, seeing if our guesses were right and explaining why we thought what we did using books like ‘Goodnight Gorilla’ by Peggy Rathman and ‘Too much glue’ by Jason Lefebvre.

In Writing, we’ve been thinking about our favourite memories, places and things that get us excited to write about. Hopefully your little one is coming home inspired about retelling interesting memories, giving you lots to discuss.

In Maths, we've had a very adventurous time thinking about place value using calculators, fencing in sheep, and learning our way around a hundreds chart in various hands-on formats, even a crazy numbers puzzle!

We’ve been thinking hard about community spaces we enjoy and having a lot of fun learning out loud in the investigations spaces. The hairdresser space and the library have been very popular.

We’ve had some interesting chats about The Zones of Regulation and how we can think about our emotions and learn about what each zone looks and feels like. The students have been considering what each zone looks like for them.

Hopefully, these little learners have come home with all sorts of exciting stories and ideas to discuss from another fun fortnight!

All the best from the Grade 1 Team

Sally Newton, Tim Huntington, Mel Layton and Ashleigh Wilson

Grade 2

Wow! What a fantastic few weeks we have had. We have spent time subatizing in Maths, learning to recognise and count groups of items quickly.

We spent time completing a Learning Task in Reading, practising our skills of 'Summarising' a book all about elephants and their desire to eat an exotic fruit.

In Writing, we continued to develop the skills to successfully write Recounts. Our photos from home have been soooo cute, with baby photos all the way up to this year, capturing some very special events in our lives ready for our Inquiry work.

Just this week we have done a mini-beast hunt in the school yard preparing to write a recount from scratch about our experience.

The Grade 2 Team

Allie Harrison, Sarah Jones and Brendan Van Haaster

Grade 3 & 4

Hi Level 3&4 families,

Wow, what a great start to the year we have had in Grade 3/4. Here’s a snapshot of what has been happening in grades 3 and 4 this week.

In Reading, we have been focusing on summarising non-fiction texts. Each day the students read an excerpt from “Let’s Save the Great Barrier Reef” by Catherine Barr. They have had to determine the main idea of each page and include supporting details and evidence to back up their claim. At the end of the week, they then used these skills to summarise previously unseen pages from the book.

In Writing, the students have been learning about writing persuasive pieces. We learned about the structure of a persuasive text, and the language features used to persuade. The students then brainstormed an idea to write about, planned their arguments and evidence needed and moved into writing a sizzling start and paragraphs with strong arguments. They are looking forward to finishing these pieces next week.

In Maths, we continued investigating place value. This week we specifically looked at adding and subtracting ones, tens, hundreds and thousands from a number, and continued working on and using different problem-solving strategies. The students also demonstrated their place value knowledge by completing a learning task.

In our Inquiry unit on ‘Identity’, we investigated health messages in the media, and knowing when to trust or distrust a health message, and understanding ways advertising strategies can influence us.

Some important dates to remember for the remainder of term are:

- Wednesday 26th February – School Photo Day

- Friday 28th February – Clean Up Australia Day (for schools)

- Friday 7th March - Curriculum Day

- Monday 10th March - Labour Day Public Holiday

- Thursday 20th March - School Athletics Day

- Friday 4th April - Last day of Term, students 2pm finish

The 3/4 Team

Damien Smith, Daena Hailey, Brent Smith, Claire Cripps and Nick Pagliaro

Grade 5 & 6

There has been lots of exciting things happening in the 5/6 classrooms in the last 2 weeks!

In Reading, we have been busy searching for high and low modality words which are used in persuasive texts. We have also revised persuasive devices, in particular emotive language. Students read the text ‘I Wanna Iguana’ and recorded as many emotive language examples as possible.

In Writing, we have revised different types of nouns such as collective nouns, proper nouns, pronouns and common nouns. We also practiced writing examples of simple sentences with a reminder to include a capital letter, full stop, subject and verb/verb phrase.

In Maths, we have been busy completing hands-on activities with a focus on place value and ‘renaming’ which involves regrouping numbers. Students loved creating their own structures and characters out of place value blocks and then recorded the matching amounts into place value tables.

Keep your eyes on compass for more news about what’s coming up. Thanks.

The 5/6 Team

Rachel Boyle, Alarna Creed, Llinos Poole, Hayley Peirce and Erin Rennick

Breakfast Club