Junior Joeys: Term 3 Wrap-Up!

As Term 3 draws to a close, we reflect on our Fridays spent together developing life skills, building friendships, and exploring the outdoors in our school bush.

Throughout this term, our main emphasis was on fostering oral communication in whole group learning and supporting social connection through unstructured play.

Literacy Exploration: Our morning group time offered rich opportunities to engage with early reading. The children enjoyed looking through picture books and making up the story, and searching for letters, words, and pictures in magazines. Through games like Eye Spy, they expanded their language vocabulary by describing, identifying, and locating items as they asked and answered questions. We also matched pictures with their initial letter sounds, and built turn-taking and executive functioning skills through memory card games.
Fine Motor Activities: Practical everyday tasks—including hanging up the washing with pegs, sweeping, pouring, scooping, and cleaning up spills—were transformed into engaging fine motor exercises.
Gross Motor Movement: Our hall space remains an excellent area for developing gross motor skills such as hopping, jumping, skipping, and animal movements.

Term Highlights

Bush Kindy: Our outdoor sessions in the Bush were a highlight this term and we were so blessed with a run of almost perfect weather conditions. Our Junior Joeys loved discovering our natural environment, using available resources to ignite their imaginations. It offered a wonderful chance for children to socialise and choose activities freely. They especially enjoyed rebuilding the leftover Sovereign Hill settlement from last year’s stage 3 Ballarat exploration.
Big School Integration: During the last few weeks we have been slowly integrating into whole school activities. This has included recess and lunch play on the playground, eating in the courtyard and having the year 5 students hang out with us. For some being in the playground with 150 students has been a little overwhelming but for most they loved hanging out with siblings, cousins, friends from preschool and the year 5 students who will become the Year 6 leaders and buddies for 2027.
Grandparents Day and Mass: We started the term with a beautiful celebration of St Anne and St Joachim at Mass followed by inviting our grandparents and special friends to visit our Junior Joey’s learning space for morning tea. I can’t tell you the number of comments I received about how well behaved the Junior Joeys were during mass. We will go to Mass on Friday October 30th for All Saints Day. We were so thrilled to have so many grandparents from our Junior Joeys class. Thank you.
Father’s Day Breakfast: Thank you to all our fathers, grandfathers and friends who joined us for an early morning breakfast and catch up in the courtyard.
Colour Run: What a fabulous way to end the term. We hope all our Juniour Joeys enjoyed their first colour run.
Numberblocks: We have continued to enjoy watching Numberblocks on ABC iview, which has made discovering numbers to 10 a fun, visual adventure.

Holiday Ideas

Outdoors: Ride bikes, scooters, collect sticks, build huts, go to parks, climb and swing.
Indoors: Puzzles, cooking, lego, cutting, make playdoh, read, sing, dance, dominoes, draw, paint or learn something new.
In the car: Talk, eye spy (I can see something that is green or I can see something starting with ssss), listen to audio books, create a treasure hunt to find on the way or draw all the things you can see. Sing, read books and count cars.

What to look forward to in Term 4

Lunch Orders: Next term we will move from the Junior Joeys meal to the full canteen lunch menu. There will also be the opportunity to purchase treats at recess and lunch from the canteen window. Garlic bread, home baked treats and ice blocks are just a few treats on offer for under $1.00

Orientation : As we prepare for 2027 our St Joseph’s Orientation program will begin on Friday 23rd October, Friday 30th October, Friday 6th November and Friday 13th November. All Junior Joeys are welcome to attend St Joseph's as normal on these days. On these days we will spend the day in the Kindergarten classroom.

End of Year Celebration: Our last day of Junior Joeys will be Friday 4th December.

Parent/Teacher Interviews

At any time next term I’d be very happy to discuss your child’s progress and explore ways we can work together to support their transition to "big school." Should you have any queries in the meantime, please feel free to reach out via email.

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday break and we look forward to welcoming you back for Term 4 Friday 16th October.

Mrs Brady, Mrs Jones and Mrs Huard.