Foundation

LITERACY

Our Foundation students are working on the letters. Our new letters are: Bb, Hh, Nn, Oo, Dd and Gg, alongside consolidating our previously learnt letters in Stage 1.  Students are gaining confidence in their ability to use these letters to make words and read words.

When writing, students are encouraged to segment a word into the sounds that they can hear within the word e.g. cat  c.a.t. before recording the word.  There is also a focus on 'Heart Words' which refer to words that do not follow normal spelling patterns and that students will need to learn off by heart. These words include: the, I, my, he, she, we, do, to, and was. At home, please continue to revise these words and make words using the letters we have been focusing on at school. 

When reading, students have been working on segmenting a word they are attempting to read into sounds and then blending the sounds together to read the word. Students are reading words that only use letter combinations that we have taught at school or 'Heart Words' that we have introduced in class.  In other areas of reading, we are continuing to work on the features of a text including identifying the parts of a book, predicting and answering question about the text including 'Who, What, and Where'. 

NUMERACY

In Numeracy, we are continuing to develop our number sense around single digit numbers. When developing our number sense, students are learning how to successfully count a collection, subitise, order, develop an understanding of breaking a number into two parts e.g. 2 and 4 makes 6 but also 3 and 3 makes 6 (Part, Part, Whole) and understand the relation of the numbers to 10 e.g. 6 is 4 less than 10. Within our numeracy sessions, students use lots of manipulatives and often engage in games to support their understanding and extend their learning.

We encourage families to continue to help support students. There a range of resources available to families to support numeracy at home including:

How to build your child's literacy skills from birth to Grade 2 | vic.gov.au (www.vic.gov.au)

Arc | Learning | The Mathscots (educationapps.vic.gov.au)

INQUIRY

Within our Inquiry topic of 'Me and my connection to people' we have been exploring families. Students have been excited to share information about their family members, celebrations and special events that each family has. We are asking all families to bring in/or send via Compass or Class Dojo a family photo. 

SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING - (SEL)

During SEL lessons, students have worked on developing mindfulness and learning about how we can use breathing to regulate our emotions.

In week 3, students trialed a guided meditation. They were able to identify their feelings before and after completing the meditation and many students noticed an obvious shift in how their body was feeling. See The Resilience Project's take-home task. You can work on this with your family.

During week 4, we read the story of The Rainbow Fish and discussed how the other fish felt when the Rainbow Fish wouldn’t share his scales. We talked about what happened to the Rainbow Fish and why he was left with no friends. 

Take Home Challenge:

Discuss the task your child completed this week. Ask your child to think of a time they didn’t share something and how that made the other person feel. Ask your child to think of an example of how you might solve a problem, other than sharing.

***Keep an eye out in future issues of the newsletter and on Class Dojo for more SEL activities you can try at home.***

Things to remember:

• Homework goes home on Mondays and comes back to school on Fridays.
• Families are welcome to come to our cohort and school assemblies on Fridays at 2:30. Cohort assemblies are held in the large Grade 1/2 space (through the blue door), and the school assemblies will be held outside under the COLA (unless otherwise advised).
• Please ensure your child has fruit, a snack, and lunch as well as a water bottle.
• Lunch orders - Please ensure all lunch orders are placed in the lunch order basket at the beginning of the day. Occasionally, students have forgotten to place lunch orders in the basket and have had an emergency lunch provided.
• Keep up the positive after-school routines (homework, dinner conversations, bedtime).

Things you can work on at home:

• Letter and sound recognition (recognising upper and lowercase letters and their most common sound) with a particular focus on the letters Mm Ss Ff Aa Tt Pp Cc Ii Bb Hh Nn Oo Dd Gg
• Heart word recognition (recognising explicitly taught words) - My, my, The, the, I, Me, me, like, can
• Reading a shared book every night focusing on concepts of print (identifying the front cover, a word, a letter, 1:1 finger pointing, talking about the story and using specific vocabulary)
• Fine motor activities – using playdoh, cutting, threading – to strengthen hand muscles
• Having nightly dinner conversations with the family (talk about the day)
• Have your child help out in the kitchen by measuring ingredients when you are making meals, and counting items that are going in the basket at the shops. This will assist in developing counting skills
• Look at some of the information provided under the Literacy, Numeracy and SEL/Inquiry headings and review these tasks to reinforce learning.