Prep News

Dear Prep Families

Welcome back to Term 2!

We hope you had a restful holiday 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.

We have continued exploring our first Unit of Inquiry centred around the Transdisciplinary Theme; ‘Who We Are’, focusing on the Central Idea, ‘Many things impact who we are in our community’. 

This week students inquired into relationships and how communities work together as they engaged in class discussion about how we work together within our classrooms and how their families work together at home. Students shared their understanding about communities through writing tasks and hands on craft activities. They continued building their knowledge about shapes and how they can work together when creating mandalas and mosaics which connects to the line of inquiry explored this week. 

We celebrated Mother’s Day this week as students welcomed their special person into their classrooms on Friday afternoon. Students shared their excitement all week as they created cards for their special person. We were thrilled to welcome our families back into the classroom as they shared this moment with their child creating craft together that they can look back on when reflecting on students Prep journey.  

Reading

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

Each week, we continue to revise and introduce ‘Good Reading Strategies’ to the Prep students. This week we have continued to revise strategies we have learnt so far such as ‘Get your mouth ready to make the first sound’, ‘Look at the pictures’, ‘Slide your finger underneath the word’, and ‘Stretch the word out loud’. We encourage the students to practise using the strategies they know when independently reading, both at school and at home.  

 Writing

In Writing, the Prep students have been introduced to writing on dotted thirds as we continue to explore recount writing where students are encouraged to write about a range of experiences including events involving their family using the 5W’s (who, what, when, where and why).

We continue to write in our ‘Special Writing Books’ this term as students build on their knowledge of sentence structure and are introduced to new high frequency words each week. They are beginning to show confidence when revising the elements of a sentence, including using finger spaces between words and a full stop at the end. Students are encouraged to practise tracing and writing their sentence independently at home, as well as completing their illustrations to match the sentence, if this was not completed during the allocated class time.

Mathematics

In Mathematics, students have continued inquiring into different 2D shapes and their attributes. They beginning to explore 3D objects, investigating objects around the school and identifying similarities and differences between 2D shapes and 3D objects using concrete materials.

Each week we revise our counting strategies and we used our counting strategies this week to celebrate our 50 days of school. Students continued developing their counting strategies by engaging with a range of concrete materials such as counters, unifix blocks, popsicle sticks and teddy bears. 

Reminders

• Students should now be bringing their iPads to school each day. Please ensure they are fully charged. iPads must be configured to the Saltwater system.
• All children must bring their reading satchels with them to school every day. Students take home readers, Special Writing Books and Oxford High Frequency Word key rings must be inside and brought to school every day.
• Hats are not compulsory this term however if students would like to wear them outside they can.

Regards,

The Prep Team