Foundation Unit

The Foundation students continue to amaze us with how much they are learning in the classroom. For the past fortnight, we have been focusing on our inquiry topic of the weather and how it impacts our daily lives. 

During our Reading lessons, we have been exploring non-fiction texts about weather and the seasons and learning to extract the key topic words from the text. The Foundation students have done an excellent job of organising their thoughts to ensure that only the most important information from the text is included in their summaries. Whilst reading, the students have been creating word lists about all the weather types of each season. 

We are very proud of the writing that our students have produced over the last two weeks as well. Students drafted a sentence or two on the types of weather in Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring, using the key topic words collected during our reading lessons. This week, we have experimented with a published piece about each season and hope to have these displayed in the classrooms very soon! 

Last week, Maths was all about length and informal measurements. The Foundation students explored the length of various items around the classroom and brainstormed how we could prove that one object was longer than another. After the exploration phase, students were taught how to measure any object with an item of the same size (unifix blocks, counters, icy pole sticks, the same child’s foot, etc.) and shown that these objects must have no gaps for the measurement to be accurate. 

This week, we have explored the concept of subtraction. Students have really enjoyed creating ‘number stories’ where animals, people or objects are taken away from an imagined scenario. Using creative background scenes, students used concrete materials to imagine their own scenarios, such as ‘There were 5 cars on the road, and three drove away. How many are left on the road?’ With a partner, students have been taking it in turns to solve each other's number stories. 

We continue to encourage students to form their letters correctly during daily handwriting and dictation lessons. Each day, students practise the correct entry and exit points of letters and experiment with sizing and formation as they write sentences. The sentences use words that include the digraphs and trigraphs we are currently working on, to allow for extra phonics practice. 

Finally, a huge thank you to parents and families for assisting the Foundation students with their amazing Book Week costumes yesterday. The students (and teachers!) had such a fun day and the students were so proud of their amazing costumes. Each student wrote about their costume or book character and included a simile about their outfit, such as ‘My tiara is sparkly like a diamond’, or ‘My shirt is as blue as the ocean’. We loved reading many of the shortlisted books throughout the day, including a wonderful book called ‘Gymnastic Fantastica,’ where we identified all the rhyming word pairs in preparation for the poetry unit we are beginning to explore.

Foundation Teachers

Libby Cannon (PLC), Courtney Lawrence (PCL)/Alison Meggs, Bree Smith (PBS)