Prep to Grade 2: 

Prep/1A

What a busy few weeks we have had in the Prep/1A classroom. On Tuesday 6th of August, the prep students reached an exciting milestone, celebrating their 100th day of school. The students looked amazing in their 'centenarian' dress ups, and together, we all enjoyed a day full of '100' themed activities. We built a tower with 100 cups, wrote 100 words, and made 100-day crowns! It was (in the words of our prep students) ... "the best day ever"! 

It was on this high note, that the Prep's celebrated Milo's birthday party on Friday 16th of August. This truly was a HUGE celebration for our preps, who have now learnt the 26 letters of the alphabet and their most common sound. The children looked fantastic dressed up as their favourite Milo character! We made fruit kebabs, played a sound memory game, decorated party hats, and went on a Milo monkey CVC word scavenger hunt with our grade 6 buddies. There was lots of party food to enjoy (thank you Mrs Dennehy for the yummy cake) and a special performance for our parents and carers at assembly. And again, it was (in the words of our prep students) ... "the best day ever"! 

If things couldn't get any busier, this week we joined the rest of the school to celebrate Book Week. On Monday, we enjoyed our whole school Book Week parade, whilst during our literacy sessions, we explored two of the shortlisted books 'One Little Duck' and 'Gymnastica Fantastica' (announced as the book of the year in the Early Childhood category).  On Friday, we will join grades 1/2/3 on a walking excursion to Wheelers Hill Library for a fantastic, interactive performance by CARP productions! This will be a wonderful way to end our Book Week celebrations.  

Literacy

Over the past three weeks, we have learnt the phoneme and corresponding graphemes for /k, /x/ and /w/. We have been learning about narrative texts and have planned and written the draft of our very own story! 

Numeracy

We concluded our Playground Maths project for the Maths Talent Quest - exploring location, measurement (length, mass), time, and number patterns in our last few days. We have been sharing objects between groups and identified the 'leftovers' when we can't make a fair share. 

1/2A

Literacy

Grade 1s have started to learn the first few of the stage 7.4 sounds over the last few weeks, having been introduced to the idea of 'split digraphs' (two letters that work together to make one sound but are separated within the word). 

We started off with new spellings for the 'long a' sound. Previously, we had learned 'ai' and 'ay' and we were able to add 'a-e' (chase) and 'a' (acorns) to our ever-expanding spelling bank.  Students have been super busy, also learning that 'c' makes a /s/ sound and 'g; makes a /j/ sound when followed by the letter e (space, stage).

Grade 2s have also been focussing on other ways to make the /j/ sound including the 'dge' trigraph (edge) as well as alternative spellings for the short u sound /u/ (gum) including 'ou' (trouble) and 'o' (oven).

For writing, we've been continuing on with our narrative unit, making changes to characters and settings to write stories with a clear and familiar structure. We have also been brainstorming and sharing ideas for creative narratives of our own. This week we are shifting our focus to text response activities for the incredible books shortlisted for book of the year by the Children's Book Council of Australia.

Numeracy

In Maths, we wrapped up our Pig the Pug project and have jumped into multiplication. Students having been learning how to use skip-counting and repeated addition to solve 'groups of' problems and have started to explore the concept of arrays.

Book Week

We had such an amazing time in our costumes on Monday, celebrating our favourite books and characters with the rest of our school. We are looking forward to our exciting library excursion this Friday afternoon.

Inquisitive Minds

We have been having so much fun in the Junior Module continuing on with our puppet project. Students have been busy designing and making their fairy tale puppets ready to start rehearsing their shows this week.