Welcome to Term 4

Welcome to Term Four 2021 Prep families. While we have started the term with our Learning from Home program, by the time this message has been sent, we will have had our first week of return to school learning. Which is something the Prep teachers have been very much looking forward to, as I am sure have many families and Prep students.

Important dates to note for Prep families

• Flying Bookworm Incursion - 12th November (Further details to come, keep an eye on Compass for consent and payment).
• Prep Prom Thursday 9th December (A celebration performance by Preps in completing their first year of school at GWPS).

Reading 

In Term Four, our literacy focus will be on reading a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts. We will delve deeper into building our comprehension and fluency skills through various strategies from the CAFÉ reading approach including “Make a picture or mental image”, “Identify the main idea and supporting details” and “Predict what will happen, then confirm”. Through a range of fiction texts, including picture books and readers theatre, students will build on previously learnt fluency strategies to “show the meaning of the text in how it is read”. 

To support your child at home: 

• When reading a text, see if your child can identify the main idea of the text. Ask ‘what is the book mainly about?’
• When reading, encourage your child to pause at a full stop, change their voice for a question and exclamation mark and change their voice to show when a character is speaking.

Writing 

In Term Four, learners will continue to investigate a range of writing genres, revisiting Narrative, as well as exploring Procedure and Poetry for the first time. A variety of VOICES strategies will be taught through explicit teaching and students will consistently learn to integrate Voice, Organisation, Ideas, Conventions, Excellent Word Choice and Sentence Fluency into their writing pieces. 

To support your child with their writing, you can try these strategies:

• Encourage your child to read their writing aloud. This will enable them to more easily pick up on and correct errors made.
• Ask your child to plan before they begin their writing – they can draw a picture, use a graphic organiser, talk about what they would like to write about with you, or use a combination of words and pictures.
• Support your child to use descriptive language (adjectives and verbs) in their writing by asking what characters or objects in their writing look like, sound like, feel like or move like.

Spelling

During Term Four, Prep will focus on learning to spell personal words. Students will find words they want to spell that could be any word that challenges them, including Magic Words, words they have misspelt in their writing or words from texts. Additionally, learners will develop their skills in following the Look, Say, Name, Cover, Write, Check (LSNCWC) process to learn the spelling of their new and interesting words. This will become part of their weekly spelling practice and completed as part of their Home Learning. Students will continue to investigate spelling rules such as suffixes, syllables and onset and rime to apply into their reading and writing. 

To support your child at home:

• Prompt your child to practice LSNCWC daily with their Individual Spelling Words.
• Discuss the definition of unknown words that they read, to assist with comprehension of text and broaden their vocabulary.

Mathematics

Throughout Mathematics this term, the Prep students will investigate a variety of Mathematical language. We began this investigation through the language of chance including “will happen”, “might happen”, “won’t happen”, “possible” and “impossible”, as well as language of time including o’clock times and times throughout the day. We will continue this learning by exploring language of measurement including mass and capacity, by comparing two objects and measuring using informal units. Towards the end of the term, we will begin to look at concepts in number including sharing and partitioning as well as revisiting addition and subtraction problems.

 To support your child at home:

• Continue to reinforce number concepts using the resources provided during Learning from Home, such as skip counting, part-part-whole, whole-part-part, adding and subtracting.
• Have a range of concrete material in which they can use (these don't have to be bought, create number cards, collect pebbles, leaves, marbles, spoons etc.)

Inquiry and You Can Do It!

This term, students will be inquiring into the question “How can we use our senses to investigate our curiosities?” Underpinned by the science inquiry skills within the Victorian Curriculum, students will learn to use their five senses to predict, observe and record experiments based on the physical sciences units of light and sound. They will then explore how their new found knowledge can be transferred into enhancing dance performances through their Prep Prom. The students will also unpack aspects of ethical capabilities by exploring the concept or right and wrong, and how our choices can impact the world around us. 

At home you can enhance your child’s learning by:

• Investigating household items that create light and sound and record observations through the five senses.
• Encouraging your child to explore their curiosities and make predictions (generating a hypothesis).
• Discussing what choices, they could make in a given situation and imagining what impact these different choices may have.