What's Happening in the Junior School

Prep

What’s Happening in Prep: Weeks 3 and 4

WOW! The Prep’s have blown our socks off with how they have transitioned into school. They have picked up routines and begun their learning journey with ease. So far, we have explored all areas of the school when looking for that cheeky Green Sheep, spent time with our Year 6 Buddies, met our Specialist Teachers and got to know our new classmates. 

Wellbeing

• Practising our class expectations
• Beginning to look at and identify various emotions
• Introducing Zones of Regulation

Literacy

• Recognising the short vowel sound /a/ apple and consonant sounds /s/ sock, /m/ man and /t/ tap
• Beginning to become ‘Independent Readers’ by pointing to the words as we read them
• Recognising and writing CVC words using a,s,m and t (e.g cat, sat, mat)
• Practising writing our names using the correct letter formation for both upper- and lower-case letter

Maths

• Practising carefully counting groups of objects up to 10
• Drawing and making patterns 
• Recognising days of the week

Specialists Program

Please find below a timetable of when your child/rens class will attend their specialist lessons. In the coming weeks, students will be creating their own timetable to bring home. 

Knowledge Unit

Big Question: How might we reuse and recycle products? 

Over the next fortnight, students will be exploring the following lines of inquiry:

• How do we recycle? 
• Why do people work as a team?

Homework 

In Prep, students receive a reading pouch with the expectation that they practise their reading at home. Within each pouch there are many resources to help consolidate your child's learning from the classroom. This includes; take home readers (books), Sound Pack cards (phonics), and a workbook containing decodable words. More information will be sent home with your child's reading pouch next week.

Reminders

• Please send along a family photo for our family wall in the Prep hallway.
• If you haven’t done so already, please send your child along with their named Art smock. These stay at school for the year.
• Wednesdays are rest days unless your child is booked in for their one-on-one assessment with their classroom teacher. Please check your allocated date/time on Compass.

Year 1

What’s Happening in Year 1 – Term 1 Week 3 and 4

Wellbeing

Our focus for Wellbeing has been on The Zones of Regulation. We have identified lots of different emotions and what zones they fit into. We have looked particularly closely at all the emotions that are in ‘The Green Zone’, as these are the emotions that we might be feeling when we are ready for learning, or ‘Good to Go’. Our next step will have us creating Zones of Regulation toolkits, so we have some strategies to try when we are feeling emotions that are not ones in ‘The Green Zone’. We understand that our toolkits will be individual and might look different to others in our class. We have created Classroom Expectations and Rules and have worked hard on identifying what ‘expected’ behaviours and ‘unexpected’ behaviours in the classroom might look like, sound like and feel like. 

Literacy

Year 1 students have had a flying start implementing our new structured, synthetics phonics programme, UFLI. We are learning our routines for blending and segmenting sounds and completing our visual and auditory drills. We have started our fluency reading, where we focus on reading with accuracy, our reading rates, and using expression when we are reading. The students in Year 1 have also been enjoying reading books from the classroom libraries.

Maths

Measurement is our maths focus at the moment. We have looked at the duration of time, as well as understanding and ordering the days of the week and the months of the year. We have created weekly timetables to take home with information for students to share with parents and carers about what special activities are happening on the different days of the week, including specialist subjects, school assemblies, and the days to change library books and take home readers.

Knowledge Unit

The Knowledge for Term 1 in Year 1 has a Design and Technology focus. Our big question for the unit of work is ‘How might we support plants and animals to survive and thrive?’ Look out for details about our excursion to Myuna Farm in Week 9 of this term (Thursday 27th March)!

Homework

Take home readers will be coming home in Week 3. The day for changing readers for Year 1 is Monday. The students will bring home three take home reading books each week. Please make sure you child brings their reading pouch with their three readers on Mondays. The take home readers will provide students with a chance to practice reading connected text at their level. We encourage students to read each reader at least twice during the week. 

Year 2

What’s Happening in Year 2 in Weeks 3 and 4

What a fabulous start we have had to 2025! It has been delightful spending the last week getting to know all of the students and hearing about the exciting adventures of the holiday break. This week we have been enjoying some team building activities such as the balloon game and the team cup stacking challenge! The students have been working hard to create some beautiful artworks for our classrooms. We have loved getting to know each other through playing our class ‘Guess Who’ game each day.

Over the next fortnight, the Year 2 students will be learning:

Wellbeing

• Reviewing the zones of regulations and identifying the body clues for each zone. Students will learn about ‘expected’ and ‘unexpected’ behaviours and begin to think about self-regulation tools.

Phonics

• Reviewing previously learnt graphemes, practicing using the Floss spelling rule and completing a diagraph review.

Literacy

• Identifying different sentence types and their key features. 
• Writing our own sentences with a noun, adjective and verb.
• Improving our reading fluency by reading passages and learning new vocabulary.

Maths

• Revising place value by identifying, writing and making two- and three-digit numbers. 
• Comparing and ordering numbers.

Knowledge Unit

This term, the Year 2 students will be looking at Earth Sciences. We will be exploring the big question: Where is Earth within the solar system and how do changes in the Sun, Moon and stars affect our daily lives?

Over the next fortnight, students will be exploring the following lines of inquiry:

• Is Earth alone in space?
• What are the planet names within the Milky Way?
• What shapes and patterns can we see in the sky?

Homework

In Week 3, your child will begin bringing home their reading pouch. Each week, they will take three decodable texts home. We strongly encourage students to reread these texts multiple times across the week as this is an important way novice readers develop automaticity and reading fluency. In addition, each student will bring home one quality text from their classroom library each week. As novice readers, they will not necessarily be able to read these books independently. However, they will benefit a great deal from hearing these texts read out loud by an expert (you!).

Reminders:

• A friendly reminder that, if possible, could your child's fruit/vegetable snack please be packed in a separate small container. This helps us ‘grab and go’ our snack during learning time.
• Each student requires their own pair of headphones and an art smock; if your child does not have a pair at school, could you please send in a labelled pair/art smock.
• Below is this term’s timetable for each specialist class.