Initia Lit – Reading

Over the past fortnight in Reading, students continued reviewing their reading and writing sentences using the digraph sounds - /th/ as in thumb, and /oo/ as in moon and the new digraph /ng/ as in swing, /ng/ as in swing, /wh/ as in whale and /ay/ as in play. They have reviewed their tricky words and have been incorporated into both reading and writing exercises.

Our Storybook sessions featured “Edward the Emu” by Sheena Knowles. Students enjoyed this Australian text and engaged with the text by identifying words such as amusing, detest and impressive, discussing their meanings by connecting them with their own experiences.

In addition, we have continued learning and practising segmenting words into their different sounds. Tapping the sounds down their arms students are able to blend the sounds together and more easily pronounce the words. This technique has been really effective at getting all levels of students to blend more fluently.

Finally, in Writing we have continued with the newly introduced technique of Colourful Semantics, a method of ensuring that students can write complete sentences by linking elements with colours. For example the ‘who’ is alway written in orange or the ‘what’ is always written in green. We have used picture prompts to write about creating a word splash of ideas to begin with.

Maths -

In Maths we have started learning how to collect data using yes/no questions and have been using our fellow classmates to gather this data from. We have also introduced the concept of subtraction which will continue on from our unit on addition that we started a couple of weeks ago. Students are initially learning the language take away and will sequentially follow with the symbols.

Integrated -

This term in Integrated, students are continuing their unit on living things where they will learn about plants and animals. This however because of The Melbourne Cup horse race public holiday this unit was omitted this week.

In Developmental Play students focused on an Indigenous text The River by Sally Morgan. The River takes the reader on a journey of what their eyes can see and their ears can hear and several activities were held where students were given a chance to listen and connect with their own environment as well as a drawing activity focussing on who live in and around a river way.

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