Prep
Dear Prep families,
Welcome back to Term 3! We’re excited for all the fun and learning ahead. This term is shaping up to be full of exciting events and great opportunities for growth across our school. We can’t wait to share it all with you!
Reading
To start off Term Three, our Prep students continued developing their prediction skills in reading. They learned to use visual cues, such as the cover illustrations and titles, along with their own prior knowledge to make thoughtful predictions about texts.
During these sessions were introduced the ‘aw’ sound, using fun stories like 'I Saw a Scary Dinosaur', to practise identifying and sounding out words with this vowel pattern.
We’ve also been exploring the differences between fiction and non-fiction books in greater detail. Prep students looked closely at non-features like photos, labels, and contents pages to help them tell the two apart. They enjoyed comparing different books and asking questions such as, “What do you notice about these two books?” and “How are they similar or different?”
Writing
Over the past two weeks, our Prep students have been practising recount writing by sharing what they did during the school break. This helped them to organise their ideas and add detail about past events and feelings.
The students have enjoyed retelling familiar stories, where students responded by sharing their thoughts and feelings about the characters and events. This supports comprehension and encourages deeper connections to the texts we read.
As part of our learning, we launched our new inquiry into living and non-living things. Students learned that living things can eat, drink, move and breathe, while non-living things cannot. We’ll continue to explore what living things need and how different environments support them.
To celebrate 100 days of school, our prep students created special crowns and reflected on their learning journey. Everyone shared something they’re proud of, linking beautifully to our writing focus on personal expression.
This fortnight’s sight words included has, as, I’m and have. We practised reading, writing, and using them in sentences. We also introduced dictation, writing down what they hear, to support listening and handwriting skills. Our sentence for the ‘aw’ sound was: “The cat has a paw as big as my hand.” You can support this learning at home by encouraging your child to use these words in simple sentences.
Literacy Focus: Phonics and Spelling
In Literacy, we revisited the letters x and qu to strengthen students’ understanding of grapheme-phoneme relationships for reading and spelling. We explored how qu always appears together, as the q is followed by u to make the /kw/ sound. We also introduced the rule that ck is used after short vowel sounds like /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/.
Maths
This week, we focused on partitioning and combining groups of up to 10 using part-part-whole relationships and subitising to quickly recognise parts of a whole. Students practised identifying which group is bigger or smaller and explaining their thinking using words like bigger, smaller, more and less.
We connected this to real life by talking about sharing with friends to see who has more and who has less.
We also explored fair sharing by reading the story of Cookie Monster. Using counters and coloured pencils as ‘cookies,’ students practised sharing a collection equally with friends, making sure each group had the same amount. They used counting strategies to check that everyone got a fair share.
Counting to 100 was another big focus as we celebrated our achievements! We tried fun ways to count in groups, like timing ourselves to see how long it took to draw 100 circles or did star jumps and used materials like LEGO and Unifix blocks to count all the way up to 100.
Wellbeing and Inquiry Learning
In our wellbeing lessons, we’ve been learning to recognise situations that make us feel stressed and practised ways to help ourselves feel better. We talked about real-life examples and tried our calming strategies, like using a sensory item such as a squishy toy or taking a break in the calm corner, as well as breathing slowly in through the nose and out through the mouth.
A Hundred Days of Prep
To celebrate 100 days of learning and growing smarter, our Prep students made their own special crowns and dressed up with fun outfits related to the number 100. It was a joyful day filled with creativity and pride as we marked this important milestone together! Congratulations to all and here's to the next 100 days of Prep.
Reminders
Please make sure your child’s iPad is fully charged and brought to school every day so they’re ready for learning.
If your child is away, please enter the reason for their absence on XUNO. If you need help with this, feel free to contact the office or chat with your classroom teacher.
Book Week is coming up in Week 5 (August 18–22)! This year’s theme is ‘Book an Adventure!’. Dress Up Day will be held on Friday, August 22, and students are encouraged to come dressed as a character from their favourite story.
In Week 6 (26, 27 28 August), we’ll have a Wildlife Xposure incursion at school. Students will learn about and interact with Australian animals as part of our inquiry into living things. A note with more information and payment details will be sent home soon.
Warm regards,
The Prep Team