Foundation 

Dear Families,

What a wonderful start to the year! It has been so lovely getting to know all of our Foundation students and learning about their favourite things and interests. We are already seeing their excitement for learning and I am so proud of how quickly everyone is adapting to school life. They’ve shown great organisation in putting away their lunch boxes and drink bottles after eating time and are taking responsibility for packing away their learning resources in the classroom. Each day, the children are growing in confidence, eagerly sharing their ideas and referring to our daily rhythm to know what’s coming next. It is lovely to see everyone settling in so beautifully. A reminder students require runners for Sport on Tuesdays.

Learning Tasks

 All students are showing great effort to return their reading bags each day and I appreciate you recording the nightly reading in their diaries. We’ve read many books about starting school and even created our own "St. Joey’s Guide to Starting School." The students have also participated in some fun literacy rotation activities—learning to form letters, search for letters and create their names in different ways.

In addition to letter activities, we’ve been focusing on the correct pencil grip and participating in tracing activities to help build up fine motor muscles. These activities are crucial as they help prepare students for writing and drawing. You can support this fine motor development at home with activities such as:

• Cutting along curvy lines
• Drawing circles on paper
• Tracing letters or shapes with your finger in the air

In mathematics, we’ve been having fun counting forwards to 50 and starting to explore numbers and their significance in our everyday lives. We’ve looked at numbers related to our birthdays, time and 1:1 counting of objects. The students are doing a wonderful job of counting and collecting the right number of items. They are also beginning to learn to form numbers from 1 to 9.

Overall, I am are so proud of how our newest learners have settled in so quickly and beautifully. They are showing such enthusiasm for learning and building a wonderful classroom community together.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or need anything. You can contact me through Dojo messages or email me at gmercuri@sjnagambie.catholic.edu.au.

Looking forward to a fantastic year ahead!

Thanks

Miss Gab