Prep News

Important Reminders

PMP Term 3 Helpers
We are organising our PMP for next term and would love your help! If you would like to volunteer please fill in this google form.
STEM news
In Week 9 students will be testing out their shelters so please bring in a small toy on the following days:
PL & PR Thursday the 22nd PD & PB Friday the 23rd
We have ample recycled materials so thank you for your donations!
Home Reading
This week you would have found new word lists in your child’s school tools books. Along with the decodable words, you will now find ‘heart words’ which are common words that cannot easily be sounded out. It would be great if you could practise these along with the letter sounds, decodable word lists and Wushka readers. Some potential activities could be finding them in books or magazines, writing them down or even playing heart word memory!
Maths Seeds Either this week or next you will find a login to Maths Seeds in your child’s school tools. This is an optional fun online program practising fundamental Maths skills if you would like further activities to complete at home.

Learning in Action

Literacy

Levi (PR) used his creativity to turn a circle into Ben Ten. He labelled and wrote a sentence about it.

The preps have worked on their finger pointing to help them read fluently and to ensure they read all the words on the page. We also looked at the strategy, ‘If you go slow to decode, go back over the road’. This means if you have to sound out many words in a sentence, you need to reread it to improve your meaning. In Writing, we practised writing 4-5 letter words and focused on the consonant blends ‘st’, ‘sp’ and ‘sn’, calling them ‘Buddies with s’. We refined our sentence knowledge by looking at a picture and verbalising complete sentences. The preps accepted the challenge of writing dictated sentences with capital letters, spaces and full stops. They also used their creativity to turn a kinder circle into something to spark an idea for writing. In Little Learners, students met Ben Bear and Leo Lion to learn the sounds for ‘Bb’ and ‘Ll’.

Preview- Students will practise their reading accuracy and fluency. They will also continue to work on writing words with 4-5 sounds and writing a sentence

Maths

Over the past fortnight the Preps have been learning about subtraction and taking away numbers from the total. We have focused on the learning goals of ‘I can use materials’ and ‘I can use drawings’ to find the answer.

Peyton (PB) ‘I can use drawings’ to find the answer.

We have started our Measurement unit and students are learning about length, finding objects that are the same length, shorter or longer.

It has been great to see students working hard on their individual learning goals and Maths Masters goals. It is important to remember that passing a Maths Masters goal requires the students to be fluent at the skill in order for them to successfully move to the next goal.

Preview- Students will continue working on their individual learning goals for subtraction. Next term students will learn about teen numbers, ordinal numbers and we will revisit addition and subtraction.

Inquiry

The Preps have had an amazing term learning about the people and places in their community. We spent the past week creating our community posters which we look forward to sharing with you during Celebration Morning. To finish our unit off with a bang the Preps were lucky enough to be visited by some community workers. We met Ellie (nurse), Jacob (firefighter), Jake (electrician) and Kristie (hairdresser). Each person shared about their jobs and how they help the community, either through looking after our health and wellbeing or personal needs. Some students were lucky enough to try out some tools of the trade!

Preview- Next term we will be doing a history unit, looking at our own personal histories and those of others.

Wellbeing

During Friendology, students have now progressed to ‘Making Friends’, which involves a lot of role-play scenarios about how to introduce themselves, and how to ask a friend (or potential friend) to play.

As part of the 4Rs program, over the past fortnight Preps have been focussing on problem-solving, which includes being able to identify options and ways to solve conflict. Last week, students played the ‘picnic problem-solving game’, where the Preps helped their teachers and each other offer up solutions for various problems as we role-played walking to the park for a picnic. This week, we focussed on

the topic ‘Can everyone play?’ using the book This is Our House by Michael Rosen and Bob Graham. The book provided excellent discussion points, and enabled students to identify the effect of unfair and unkind behaviour on others.

Preview: Next week for RRRR, we will be focussing on Friendly and Unfriendly Decisions. Friendology will see students begin on their fourth topic, Friendship Facts.

World Ocean Day

On Thursday the 8th of June, the whole school dressed up as sea creatures to celebrate ‘World Ocean Day.’ It was fantastic to see an ocean of Preps in blue, many turtles and even a couple of jellyfish amongst our classes! We took this time to learn some facts about our delegated animal, the sea turtle. Did you know that turtles can sleep underwater for up to 5 hours and that there are over 350 different species of turtles?