Prep 2025

Welcome to Prep!

Welcome to the new school year in Prep! We are delighted to have you and your child as part of our school community. This year promises to be an exciting journey filled with learning, discovery, and growth.

The Prep team is committed to providing a nurturing and engaging environment that supports your child's educational journey. We look forward to partnering with you to ensure a successful and rewarding experience for your little one.

SMART Spelling

To support our whole-school SMART Spelling (Michelle Hutchison) approach, each week we will provide on Compass the Word of the Week and Sentence of the Week.

Please:

• Help your child practice and learn the letters and sounds which make up the Word of the Week.

• Encourage your child to practice writing the Word of the Week and Sentence of the Week.

Nessy

This year we will be using the online Nessy Hairy Reading platform. Hairy Reading is game-based and fun. 

Students can work through it independently because the activities are engaging and motivational. Students are automatically guided through fun, structured learning lessons in a plan designed just for them! 

The lessons progress gradually from simple to complex. They develop phonological sound (phoneme) discrimination before letters are introduced.

Clear Folder

You child has started to bring home their Clear Folder each night. The Clear Folder is a useful communication tool, allowing notes to be sent home or for notes to be sent to the teacher/school. We ask that the Clear Folders are brought to school each day and placed in the classroom tub each morning.

Home Reading

Prep- Home Reading

The Prep Home Reading Program will begin with parents reading a rich literacy text to their child each night. These books will be selected by the students and sent home in the Green Reading Bag along with their Reading Diary each night.

As students develop their understanding of letters and sounds at school, they will start bringing home decodable texts. These books are specifically designed to support the development of phonological decoding skills. Decodable texts reinforce letter-sound relationships and encourage students to focus on decoding words rather than guessing, in line with the science of reading.

We hope that home reading becomes an enjoyable and meaningful time shared with your child. Our goal is for every student to experience success and develop a love of reading. Additionally, the class teacher will regularly read with your child to further support their skill development.

More information about the Prep Home Reading Program will be sent home via Compass in the coming weeks.

Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Prep 

As part of our reading program and our commitment to systematic synthetic phonics, we will using the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum during our dedicated Literacy blocks. Systematic synthetic phonics is a structured approach that explicitly teaches the relationship between sounds and letters to read words.

The Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is a systematic program of daily lesson plans that provide a high level of explicit modelling and student engagement.

 Each level of the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum focuses on six to eight phonemic awareness skills, along with additional activities to develop letter and sound recognition, introduce the phoneme-grapheme connection and extended language awareness.

The Heggerty Curriculum includes explicit instruction in the following phonological and phonemic awareness skills:

• Rhyming
• Initial Phoneme Isolation
• Blending
• Isolating final and medial phonemes (sounds)
• Segmenting
• Adding Phonemes
• Deleting Phonemes
• Substituting Phonemes

Special Dates

Term 1

School Photos - Monday 3 March

Colour Run - Tuesday 25 March

Term 2

Parent Teacher Interviews - TBC

Prep Mother's Day Pampering - Wednesday 7 May

Semester Report - June

Term 3

Student Led Conferences - TBC

Prep Grandparents Day - June 18 June

Prep Father's Day - Wednesday 3 September

Prep Cubby Day - Wednesday 10 September

Life Ed - Monday 11 - Thursday 22 August

Term 4

Prep Swimming - Monday 20 October - Thursday 30 October

Prep Aquarium Excursion - Wednesday 12 November

Semester Report – December

Compass

We also ask that you keep informed regularly check the Compass News Feed and action requests as they are posted throughout the year.

Ongoing feedback will also be provided throughout the year via Compass Learning Tasks.

Contacting Your Teachers

We understand that you may have questions to ask of the teacher, however the mornings are set aside for planning, preparation and a daily staff meeting. If you have any questions, please pop a note into the reading/multi-purpose bag or you can send an email (marked to the attention of your child’s teacher) to: beaumaris.north.ps@education.vic.gov.au

Informal discussions may be arranged upon request at any time throughout the year to discuss specific issues however please be assured that we will contact you should we have any concerns.

Finally...

Don’t forget to check out our A-Z Parent Guide for anything else you need to know about BNPS! This (along with loads of other information!) can be accessed on our comprehensive website.

We encourage you to get involved by discussing your child’s school day, offering to assist classroom programs and attending our school events - it’s going to be a wonderful year!

Kind regards

The Prep Team

 Kate Morrison, Melinda Docker, Sue Evins & Tanya Gibbon

Beaumaris North Primary School is an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School authorised to teach the IB Primary Years Programme (PYP) and provides the framework for implementing the requirements of the Victorian Curriculum. 

The IB Primary Years Programme is an innovative international programme of teaching and learning that focuses on the development of the whole child and fosters a positive attitude to learning. The PYP strives towards developing internationally minded students who demonstrate the attributes of the IB Learner Profile. Accordingly, at BNPS we aim to educate inquiring, knowledgeable, and caring students, who are encouraged to ask challenging questions, critically reflect, and take responsible action.