Level 1: Connect

Hello Level 1 families,

Welcome to our first newsletter of Term 3. We hope you all enjoyed the winter holiday break!

It's wonderful to be back at SEPS after the holidays and the students have hit the ground running. Teachers have been so happy with the Level 1 students' energy, enthusiasm and excitement at being back this term.

We have had some minor timetable changes this term, so please see the Term 3 timetable below.

Please also have a peruse of what's on for the next fortnight below. It's shaping up to be a busy term with lots of wonderful learning ahead.

Have a wonderful fortnight,

Nishtha, Lizzie and Robyn

Reminders

Literacy

Reading and Writing

We are aiming to build our reading stamina during our Reading lessons this Semester. In each lesson, students have the opportunity to spend up to 10 minutes reading a take home reader suited to them to practise sustained, silent reading and implement the reading strategy, such as predicting, making connections, summarising and asking questions. 

In Writing, students have been enjoying learning about Indigenous perspectives around Ceremony and the history of Australia. They have been using mentor texts to write detailed facts and discussing different perspectives. Over the next fortnight, we will be exploring the book 'Come Down, Cat!' By Sonya Hartnett - discussing and writing about the theme of friendship, using adjectives to describe characters and writing a diary entry. In Week 4, students will explore the non-fiction book 'Let's Save Antarctica' by Catherine Barr. They will be learning about the features of an information text and will have a go at writing an information report of their own.

Core Literacy

Students are involved in Core Literacy lessons every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. 

During these lessons, students engage in many activities relating to spelling, phonics and morphology (how words are formed and how they relate to each other) such as dictation, card deck and reading words.

Each week we have a sound/letter focus and a morphology focus.

During each of these sessions, students have a text that matches back to their reading level that is read daily. These texts go home with the student every Friday for hopefully extra practise at home. 

Here's what's happening in Core Literacy in the fortnight ahead:

Heart Words - some, other, too

                           - one, gone, once

Morphology - vowel-consonant-magic e syllables within words & other types of syllables revision

Phonemes- ow as in cow and kn as in knife

Maths

Over the next fortnight, students will be exploring time and duration. They will learn to identify the features of an analogue clock by creating their own clock face and distinguishing between the hour hand and the minute hand. Students will practise skip counting by fives to identify the minutes around a clock and label the five-minute intervals. They will also develop their understanding of telling and representing o'clock times by reading analogue clocks and drawing the hands to show times to the hour. In addition, students will estimate the duration of events using minutes and hours and build their understanding of calendar time by learning that there are seven days in a week and twelve months in a year, and naming them in the correct order.

Inquiry

Following on from the students' interest and enjoyment in our geography focus last term, out Term 3 Inquiry focus is all about Australian History.

By the end of this unit, students will:

• Understand that Aboriginal Peoples were the first to explore and settle Australia, using knowledge of land, water, and seasons.
• Know that Aboriginal People already lived on the land before Europeans arrived, and that their knowledge systems mapped Country in different ways.
• Describe how early settlers in Sydney Town faced challenges with farming, water, and food, and how Arthur Phillip helped the colony survive.
• Recognise that Bass and Flinders mapped the coastline and discovered Bass Strait, helping future travel and trade.

Term 3 Timetable