Prep 

INFORMATION

🏠 Mont De Lancey excursion - this Friday!

Our Mont De Lancey excursion is coming up this Friday 31st October! To help you and your child prepare for the day, please see a few reminders below. Full excursion details can also be found on Sentral, and we have included a screenshot of the information below.

🚌 When to Arrive

Please make sure your child arrives at school by 8:30am, as we’ll be leaving promptly at 8:50am.

👕 Uniform

• Full school uniform is required.
• Students will receive their school hats in the classroom before we get on the bus.

🎒 What to Bring

• A small backpack with lunch, snack and a full water bottle.
• ‼️ Mont De Lancey requires us to take all of our rubbish home, so we suggest packing a ‘nude food’ lunch to make this easier.
• ‼️ Please do not order from the Pop Up Canteen, as we will be off-site for the day.
• The weather is expected to be warm, so please apply sunscreen before school and pack some in your child’s bag. We’ll have regular sunscreen top-up times throughout the day.

💳 Payment and Permission

If you haven’t yet given permission and made payment on Sentral, please do so by Wednesday.

We are looking forward to a wonderful day of learning and fun together at Mont De Lancey!

📚Library

There is no library session this week, due to the Art Show being displayed in the BER.

✍🏼 Whiteboard markers

Some students are running low on their whiteboard markers, and a few have already finished their allocation. If you’d like to, you’re very welcome to send an extra marker to school, which we will put straight into your child’s bag for them to use. If not, students will still be able to take part in all activities using their clipboard and writing paper instead.

CURRICULUM

📚 Phonemic awareness: reading and phonics

We will continue our learning about long vowel sounds with a review of words where a final, silent ‘e’ makes the vowel say its name (this is called a 'split digraph' - eg. cake, theme, bike, rope, and cube). We will also be learning that the letters ‘ce’ can make an ‘s’ sound at the end of some words, as in nice. 

Our focus will include:

• Learning the phonemes (the sounds the letters make).
• Practising the graphemes (how we write the letters with correct formation).
• Reading longer words 
• Reading short texts that include the focus long vowel sounds, as well as previously learned digraphs.

We will review previously learned heart words., with no new words being introduced this week.

What can you do at home?

• Help your child read the take-home book, decodable passages and Heart Words from their book pocket. Aim for fluency by the second day of reading. 

As your child reads, encourage them to recognise familiar words instantly and only sound out unfamiliar ones.

• Enjoy bedtime stories together to build vocabulary, comprehension and a love of reading.

• Work through the optional UFLI home pages if you’d like some extra phonics practise at home.

📝 Literature: reading responses and writing 

Our Mentor Text is Kookoo Kookaburra by Gregg Dreise. Students will revisit the key elements of a narrative, including the character, setting, beginning, middle and end. They will explore cause and effect by thinking about how Kookoo’s actions affected others in the story. We will discuss the important message that Kookoo learns (about the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at someone). Students will then create their own Kindness Kookaburra, complete with speech bubbles to share positive and kind messages.

All of our Mentor Text sessions will include plenty of writing opportunities for students to apply and extend their learning. They will also write to a picture prompt featuring words with long vowel sounds, giving them a fun way to practise their new understanding of vowel sounds.

Students are continuing to refine their handwriting and letter formation using their Sky, Grass, Ground writing books.

What can you do at home?

• Practise 'boss letters' and then practise its cousins (see below).

• Build in authentic writing experiences like writing a shopping list, birthday cards, wish lists or notes for family members. 

• Say it, then write it – Ask your child to say their sentence out loud first, then write it down.

• Check for capitals and full stops – Remind your child to start with a capital letter and finish with a full stop.

•  Practise writing the Heart Words, taking care to notice the tricky 'heart' parts in the word.

🔢  Maths 

We will be wrapping up our current unit on counting and place value. Students will apply their understanding by solving a range of two-digit place value problems, using reasoning to explain their thinking. They will also explore questions with more than one possible answer, encouraging flexible and creative problem-solving.

What can you do at home?

• Practise counting forwards and backwards from different starting points (e.g. start at 47 and count back to 30).

• Look for two-digit numbers in your environment (letterboxes, signs, prices) and talk about the tens and ones.

• Play “Who has more?” by picking two numbers and asking your child which is greater or smaller, and how they know.

🌏 CBL - Discovery

In our CBL session, we will be creating a Kindness Boomerang to connect with one of the key messages from our mentor text - “Kindness is like a boomerang - if you throw it often, it comes back often.” We will also revisit our learning from last term about 'Change', as we prepare for our upcoming excursion to Mont De Lancey, where we’ll explore what life and school were like in the past.