Foundation 

Communicating with the Foundation Team

We look forward to partnering with you in 2021, and welcome your input: 

Holly Peters  Holly.Peters@education.vic.gov.au

Lisa Dam  Lisa.Dam@education.vic.gov.au

Term Three in Foundation! 

INQUIRY

Our topic for Inquiry in Term Three is Ancestry. Students will explore and communicate their own history and that of their families with their fellow students. They will identify who the people in their family are, where they were born and raised, how they are related to each other and how their stories are communicated and shared. Students will explore the differences and similarities between students' daily lives and perspectives of life during their parents’ and grandparents’ childhoods, including family traditions and leisure time.

 The Foundation students have identified and discussed the cultural history of our community through reading and exploring a variety of picture story books and completing bark paintings. 

In the coming weeks, students will be provided with a questionnaire to interview a relative or special person from their family. They will use this information to produce a poster about this special person. 

Students will also be attending an incursion called ‘Toys Over Time’.

They will discover how toys have evolved over time by exploring their movements, cultural significance and the materials they are made from. Student’s imaginations will be engaged and their sharing skills encouraged as they encounter examples of toys from as early as 2000 BC - the oldest toys in the world!

LITERACY

In Reading this term, we will be continuing to follow the InitiaLit English Program. Students will be introduced to the letters v, w, x, y and z, and what the vowels are. Middle vowel sounds in words will continue to be focused upon as well as oral blending and segmenting of words with four sounds. They will also learn all about digraphs and that two letters together can represent one sound eg: ck, sh, ll, ss, ff. 

Each week the students will also be involved in a variety of reading and writing activities through our literacy sessions, which will focus on the weekly letters, digraphs and tricky words from the program. The children will be learning new tricky words and will be eagerly adding them to our tricky word tree. They will continue to focus on a variety of reading strategies such as making connections with texts, sequencing events, using their learnt skills to decode unknown words and making predictions. 

In Writing, students will continue to strengthen their knowledge and ability to correctly form  their letters and numerals using the correct starting point and size. They will further develop their skills of Recount writing and then move on to Narrative writing. Students will learn the purpose, structure and features of Narratives and create their own Narrative. They will develop their punctuation skills and begin to more accurately include full stops and capital letters in their writing. 

As part of our Speaking and Listening program, Show and Tell will commence in Week Four and will run four days a week. This is a great opportunity for your child to become accustomed to speaking in front of an audience and we strongly encourage them to participate. We use the show and tell program to form part of our speaking and listening assessment. There will be specific topics for each week, as shown below. 

The day that your child will have show and tell is dependent of their house colour: Monday- Coolibah (blue), Tuesday- Mulga (green), Thursday – Waratah (red) and Friday- Wattle (yellow).

MATHS

In Number and Algebra during Term Three, we have been excitedly counting and recording the number of days we have been at school in anticipation of our 100 days celebration in August. We will be continuing to develop our number sense through counting and our place value knowledge by partitioning double digit numbers. Students will continue to strengthen their ability when working with addition and subtraction and represent financial situations involving money. They will explore clocks and their purpose and will begin to tell the time on the hour. Students will be learning to use different materials to compare and measure the capacity and weight of objects.

100 DAYS OF SCHOOL

Throughout Term Three, our units of study will focus around building our understanding of ancestry and family histories. As part of our learning, we will also be celebrating the historic “100 days of school” for our Foundation students on Friday 20th August 2021. The students are very excited about celebrating our 100th day of school and have been eagerly counting down the days. The day involves a variety of activities based around the number 100.

To help celebrate the occasion, we encourage all students to come to school in “100” themed attire. We encourage you to be creative with your dress-up. Some ideas to prompt your thinking are:

-          dressing as a 100 year-old person

-          dressing as a cricket player who has scored a century, or similar

-          dressing as a student, occupation or person from 100 years ago

-          dressing up to represent something which may come in hundreds

-          wearing the number 100 on you, such as a t-shirt with tally marks or similar

-          searching ideas online for “100 days of school dress-ups”.

A themed dress-up is encouraged, but not compulsory. Students who would prefer to wear their school uniform will also be provided with the option of wearing a prop or similar, if they choose to during the celebrations.

See below for the detailed notice regarding the 100 Days of School celebrations.  

SMILE SQUAD DENTAL VAN

The Smile Squad Dental Van came and made a special visit to the Foundation students on Thursday. They discussed all about what foods are good or bad for our teeth, how to brush our teeth and when, what dentists and patients wear, how many teeth we have, sugar bugs and we had a look at what's inside the big orange dental van! The students thoroughly enjoyed the visit and are looking forward to their dental visits!

Specialist Timetable

Please note the following information regarding the days that each grade has specialist classes.  * These times are subject to change during school-wide events (eg: swimming timetables) *