Prep

Dear Prep families and carers,

Welcome back to Term 4!

We hope you had a restful term break and we are so glad to have our students back in the classroom. It is lovely to see their excitement each morning as they enter the classrooms ready for the day.

To kickstart our term, students engaged in a ‘Guess the Toddler Teacher’ game. This activity was an initial lead in to our unit of inquiry and sparked some real excitement before we formally introduced the unit of work. Here are the answers you’ve been waiting for!

In week 1, students engaged in Provocation Day activities where they explored topics listed below, through hands-on experiences:

• Dreamtime stories
• Aboriginal paintings and symbols
• Yarning
• Cultural traditions, clothes, food, etc
• Old and new technology and transportation
• Personal journeys and timelines.

In week 2, students were exposed to our new Unit of Inquiry under the Transdisciplinary Theme ‘Where We Are in Place and Time’. Students brainstormed their understanding of our Central Idea ‘Journeys inspire our imagination’ and communicated their prior knowledge with their peers. 

Reading

In Reading, students revised their knowledge of reading strategies and making predictions, building on their understanding of how predictions can change during our reading of the text. Students continued to build their reasoning skills by justifying their predictions using the evidence from the text at different stages of reading.

Students explored the genre of narratives where they were able to identify what narratives are and their purpose. They learnt about the features of narrative texts including characters, setting, introduction, problem, solution and ending. A narrative text is a type of written or spoken communication that tells a story or recounts a sequence of events. Narrative texts can take various forms, including novels, short stories, folktales and more. 

Writing

In Writing, students began to write their own narratives through shared and independent writing with a focus on the introduction, including characters and setting. They built on their ideas as the week progressed, adding a problem to their narrative using describing words in their sentences. 

Students are encouraged to hear the sounds in challenging words they would like to spell, when attempting writing tasks. They use their keyring words and the word wall to write familiar high frequency words in their writing. Students are practising the strategy of re-reading their work to check for missing capital letters, finger spaces and full stops prior to sharing their work to the teacher.  

Mathematics

Each week we revise our counting strategies including counting forwards and backwards from. 0 to 100, counting forwards and backwards from any starting point, identifying subitised numbers and identifying number patterns of 2s, 5s and 10s in number sequences.  

The concept of mass was introduced and explained as the measure of how heavy or light an object is. Students learnt that mass is typically measured in units like grams or kilograms. They explored this concept through hands-on activities, comparing the mass of different objects and using terms like "heavy" and "light" to describe them.  The exploration of mass has been introduced in a fun and age-appropriate way. These early lessons lay the foundation for understanding the properties of matter and basic measurement skills, teaching students about the physical world and laying the foundation for more complex mathematical and scientific concepts in the future. 

Reminders

• Hats are compulsory this term. No Hat. No Play.
• Parents can provide their child with their own sunscreen to put on prior to all outdoor activities and recess breaks. 
• Students to bring their iPads to school each day. Please ensure they are fully charged. 

We look forward to our final term in prep which began on Monday October 2nd and concludes on Tuesday 19 December 2023.

Regards,

The Prep Team