Hello,

Nose blowing

There seems to be a few Preps at the moment with colds and runny noses. With some of the students this is resulting in noses being wiped with hands and fingers in noses. Ick! When prompted to get a tissue to blow their noses, some children are just wiping them. We would appreciate it if you could ensure that your child has a practise independently blowing their nose if required. We are also encouraging them to immediately dispose of the tissue and to sanitise their hands.

You can understand the importance of all of the Preps consistently using good hygiene practices.

Home reading

Most of the Preps are getting into a good routine with home reading and are bringing their take home book/s back the next day.

Thank you very much to the parents who are writing the titles of the book/s read in the planners each evening. Some of the children are beginning to write the titles in their planner themselves which is great to see.

Learner profile certificates

You will have seen on Seesaw the photos of the students who have received a learner profile certificate at assembly. Each week the Prep teachers select someone from their class who has been regularly displaying an attribute of the learner profile. These are given out at Friday's assembly.

The learner profile is a list of ten attributes that we want all learners to develop. It comes from the Primary Years Program (PYP) of the International Baccalaureate (IB). Attached you will find a copy.

W2R

This week we have learnt the codes 'b', 'e' and 'd'. Students recognise that the letter 'b' makes one sound (e.g. b like bag). The letter 'e' makes two sounds (e like egg and e like me). The letter d has one sound (d like dog).

Next week we will be focusing on two new codes 'f' and 'v'. Students will learn that both these codes make one sound (f like fish and v like vet).

Although students will be exposed to the different sounds each letter makes, we will mainly focus on the first and most common sound for each letter.

You can support your child by revising the previous sounds we have taught. You may like to ask your child if they can tell you a word with one of these sounds at the beginning or for a challenge, at the end. For example, puppy or mop.

A common error children make is the reversal of the the letters 'b' and 'd'. To support your child with this confusion refer to this visual that we have looked at in class.

Phonemic Awareness

We are focusing on isolating beginning and final sounds in words. Students identify the sound by saying the word out loud and listening to the first or last sound that they can hear.

Literacy

We will be continuing to respond to texts in our Reader's Notebook. Through shared reading students will track their thinking and build their comprehension skills. Their responses will have a focus on how a character's feelings can change throughout a story.

Handwriting

We will continue focusing on both the uppercase/capital and lowercase letter formation for the codes learnt. We have begun writing short sentences to support the skills involved to write. This includes a focus on consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words. For example, cat and dog.

Numeracy

In Number, we have been working on developing the Preps understanding of the different ways to make 10. For example, 3 and 7 make 10, 8 and 2 make 10. Having fluency with 10 will contribute to many mathematical concepts in later grades. It is really important in Prep that we do not rush into more advanced concepts and numbers but ensure that all of the foundation concepts are clearly understood.

Another Number focus has been on subitising which is being able to see a collection of objects and being able to work out how many there are without having to count each one individually. For example, if there were an arrangement of five objects I might see that there are two and two and one and that altogether that makes five. Understanding the concept of 'altogether' is an important step. A place to start practising this skill is with a dice when playing board games. Attached you will find some examples.

We are also continuing our work with Data and reading simple data tables to decide the totals for sections of the data. Vocabulary that we are developing through these activities are 'total', 'altogether', 'more' and 'less'.

Unit of Inquiry

Our Preps have been continuing to practise scenarios to problems/challenges they may face in the classroom or in the playground. This week we have been practising ways to decide who goes first in a game and congratulating the winner.

Next week students will work out a meeting spot in the playground to help them find each other if they get separated. They will rate problems on a catastrophe scale and finally make puppets to role play different problem scenarios and how they could solve these problems.

The Prep team

0A - Kathryn Morrison

kathryn.morrison@education.vic.gov.au

0B - Isabella Maresca

isabella.maresca@education.vic.gov.au

0C - Deb Barden

deborah.barden@education.vic.gov.au

0D - Danielle Palombi

danielle.palombi@education.vic.gov.au

0E - Julie Daniel

julie.daniel@education.vic.gov.au

oD (Teacher of the Deaf) - Krystle Horadam

krystle.horadam@education.vic.gov.au

Prep Fortnightly Snapshot

Issue 3 · 20 Mar 2021

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