Rise and Shine

Prep Community News

Dear Prep Families,

 

Welcome to our latest Prep newsletter! We are so excited to share with you the wonderful learning, growth, and adventures that have been happening over the past few weeks. Keep reading to find updates on what we’ve been learning, important reminders, and a few tips to support your child’s learning journey at home.

 

 

English:

Through our InitiaLit program, we have been revising all previous sounds as well as learning some new ones! We have learned that ‘v’ says /v/, ‘x’ says /ks/ and ‘y’ says /y/.  You can help to support your child at home by asking them “what sound?” when they see the letters. Here are some visual prompts:

Click here to practice all the sounds we have learned so far!

 

 

After we have introduced a new sound and connected it to its corresponding letter/s, we then practice reading and writing. We provide opportunities to read and write CVC/CVCC words using sounds they have learnt. You can support your child at home by asking them to tell you the sounds in a word and then asking them to write it. Please see a list of examples below: 

vet, yum, chop, fix, chat, such, yet, rich, yet, van

 

 

We have also introduced more tricky words! These are words that cannot be sounded out using the sounds we have learnt, so we must learn them through sight. To support your child at home, you can ask them to read and spell each tricky word. Our new tricky words are:

 

1. like  2. very

 

Click here to practice all the trick words we have learned so far! 

 

 

 

Story Book:

Our new story this fortnight is Possum Goes To School, written by Melanie Carter and illustrated by Nicola Orma. Our focus words from this text are rattle, crumble, and pant.

 

Through our story book lessons, we learn essential reading skills such as predicting, summarising as well as answering questions about the text. We then make connections between the text, ourselves and the world around us.

 

 

To support your child’s vocabulary development, you can ask them for the definition of each word or to use it in a sentence! Another fun activity is to act out the word, ask your child to act out the following scenarios:

  • Show me how you would look if you were a person rattling some maracas.
  • Let’s pretend we were eating a cookie, and it began to crumble all over the floor.
  • Show me how you would look if you had been running for a while and began to pant.

 

 

Writing:

In writing, we have been focusing on spacing out our words when writing. We have learned that between every word we should have a finger space as we don’t want the words to be too close together and we must be able to see where one-word ends, and the next word begins. 

 

To support your child’s learning at home, you can remind them that we need a finger space after every word and encourage them to place two fingers on the paper after their previous word before writing their next word. 

 

Some sentence suggestions to practise could be:

  1. You can fix the tap.
  2. My dog is at the vet.
  3. I put the box on the bed.

 

 

 

Maths:

In Maths, we have learned that subtraction means to take-away or minus and when we complete this, we change direction of counting and count backwards instead of forwards. You can support your child at home by asking them to start at a number and count backwards. For example, ask them to count backwards from 19 to 11!

 

Furthermore, we have introduced Data Displays. We previously learnt that objects can be sorted by different properties. For example, we can sort things into big and small. Sorting lets us count and compare groups of objects easily. To make comparisons easier, we can create a data display. A data display is a visual way to show how many objects we have like this one below: 

Show your child the following images and ask them to identify whether which colour has the most objects: 

 

 

Geography:

In Geography, we are continuing our World tour, exploring each continent! Our next destination was Africa! We learnt that Africa is the second largest continent in the world. There are fifty-four countries on this continent, all with their own languages. We then looked at some of the most famous animals found in Africa, including Elephants, leopards, and lions! We are so excited to continue our world tour and explore more continents! We love singing the continent song to help us remember all seven continents. Find the link here: Seven Continents Song 

 

 

 

Book Week Celebrations:

In week 5, we had the most amazing time celebrating Book Week! We got to create our own Prep cohort storybook that can be found in our school library. We also got to visit a room full of adventure to read this year's most popular picture story books! Our prep students dressed up as their favourite book characters and enjoyed a fun show based on one of the bestselling picture story books from this year.

 

 

Reminders:

 

Take Home Reading:

At Tarneit Rise, we encourage reading every night. Each child has an assigned day to change their reading books. Please bring their reading satchel on this day so classroom teachers can check reading journals and assist your child in getting new books.

 

Building Independence:

A friendly reminder that parents should not be entering the pods in the morning. Please say goodbye to your child at the door and encourage them to walk in themselves and put their bag away independently. This will be important practice for when they progress to Grade 1 (can’t believe we are mentioning Grade 1 already, where has this year gone!?). 

 

We love celebrating the children’s achievements, big and small, and we hope this newsletter gives you a glimpse into their daily experiences and progress. Thank you for your continued support and partnership. We can’t wait to see what the next few weeks bring!

 

 

Warm Regards,

 

PLC Prep