Foundation

Teachers: Nikki Lewis, Courtney Williams, Bec Mealings and Lauren Pring

Happy Mother’s Day to all of the wonderful Mums and Grandmas! We hope you have a lovely weekend and enjoy the small gift we made in the classrooms.

Important Dates

Monday 20th May – Whole School Assembly

Tuesday 21st May - Royal Flying Doctors Incursion

Monday 27th May – F-2 Assembly

Wednesday 4th June and 11th May - Firefighters Visit

Monday 10th June – King’s Birthday Public Holiday (no students at school)

Monday 17th June – Whole School Assembly

Royal Flying Doctors Incursion

On Tuesday 21st May, we are so excited to welcome the Royal Flying Doctors and their plane into our school! This incursion is part of Foundation students learning about our Community Helpers and also occupations. The notice/payment is available on Compass. If the payment is not made before the incursion, students will unfortunately miss out on going on the plane and using the flight simulator! It is a highlight for all our Preps.

Busy, Busy Corridors

In the mornings, our Foundation corridors are extremely full and extremely busy! We are so proud of how independent our students are at carrying their own bags up the stairs and into the classrooms.. and how they can unpack all by themselves.

If your child is in the line (or arrives as our line is walking in) please leave your child to come up the stairs and into the classroom by themselves. We have had many parents walking with the class into the corridor, carrying a bag or just to watch their child unpack. This makes our corridors very busy and squishy places... especially when we have reading helpers arriving in the mornings too.

If you arrive after the bell (and the classes are already inside their rooms) please walk your child to the office to sign them in and then walk them to the classroom. We do the roll first thing in the morning and so your child may be left as absent if they arrive after it is completed.

If your child is having trouble separating in the morning, please speak to your teacher. We can definitely help with this and make a plan to make these morning drop offs easier... and our corridors less busy.

Late Arrivals

Just a reminder to please arrive at school before 8.57 (the first morning bell)! This helps students in many ways - including separating in the morning. Bringing students into the class 5-15 minutes late is extremely disruptive to the class' and their own morning routine.

Foundation students thrive on routine and we have lots of jobs to complete in the morning before we begin our lessons. Students trickling in after the bell is tricky for the rest of the class but can also be stressful for the student as they try to complete their jobs. We understand the occasional late arrival as mornings can be busy times and we appreciate your efforts in getting to school on time.. but there are some children who are consistently arriving 5-10 minutes late.

If you do arrive late, as mentioned earlier - please sign your child in at the office. It is also not a time to talk to the teacher as we are very busy teaching and going through the morning routine with the class.

PMP

We have had so much fun in PMP in the last few weeks. PMP is the Perceptual Motor Program and it focuses on building our gross motor skills. Gross motor skills are those that require whole body movement and use large muscles. Practising our gross motor skills helps us to do everyday activities such as standing, sitting, running and sitting at a table.

Here are some of the fun things we have been doing in in PMP:

What’s on in the Classroom?

Maths

We are:

- counting forwards and backwards from different starting points

- introducing subtraction strategies such as Count Back

- using location words to describe where an object is (behind, next to, near, above etc)

- identifying, copying and continuing patterns

- creating our own patterns using lots of different materials

- comparing the capacity of containers

- using the words full, half full, empty, overflowing to describe capacity

Literacy

- revising and learning new sounds

- learning common words

- using our sounds to read simple sentences

- explicit focus on using finger spaces between each word in a sentence

- starting to write our own books about our lives

We have had lots of lessons focusing on using finger spaces between words in a sentence. Have a look at us practice:

Here are some photos from our Reading Groups. We are getting so good at sharing and reading with a partner. We are also practicing the formation of our letters in lots of different ways!