Foundation

Teachers: Nikki Lewis, Bec Mealings, Courtney Williams, Damon Webb, Nic Walsh & Fiona Hedstrom.

A reminder that next week, there is a long weekend! Teachers are participating in a Professional Practice Day on Friday 9th June and Monday 12th June is the King’s Birthday public holiday. Both of these days, there are no students at school.

Dates

Friday 9th June – Professional Practice Day (no students at school)

Monday 12th June – King’s Birthday Public Holiday (no students at school)

Wednesday 14th June – Occupations Dress Up Day

Monday 19th June – Assembly

Friday 23rd June – Final Day of Term – early finish at 2.30pm

Royal Flying Doctors

We all had such an amazing time at the Royal Flying Doctors Incursion. We learnt about how they help in faraway parts of Australia and got to practice beinen doctors, pilots and nurses. We even learnt that if you look on the $20 note, you can see the Royal Flying Doctors! Have a look at our writing about the incursion and also some photos.

Occupations Dress Up Day

We have been talking about our past. Now we are starting to talk about our future! As part of this, we are having a dress up day. The dress up day is for Foundation students only on Wednesday 14th June. Students are encouraged to wear clothes that would match a job they might like to do when they grow up or dress up like a community helper!

Home Reading

Next term, all students will be moving to nightly readers! Students will change their book every day at school and we encourage you to read the book with your child as well as practicing some comprehension skills afterwards. These comprehension skills and questions can include:

retelling the story
asking students to find certain events in the book
drawing their favourite part of the book
what is the name of the main character?
when did …… happen?
who did …….?
why do you think…?
how do you feel about …..?
questions about how characters may be feeling
what was the problem in the story?
why did the character do that?
did you like the story? Why/why not?

In students’ reader folders, teachers will be also be writing goals for students to practice in their reading at home.

Once students are confident readers and familiar with more common words, they will be moving away from decodable readers (current take home books). Students may continue to practice their sound blending and move through the coloured decodables for several more weeks in Term 3 or they may start the new readers straight away.

Please do not worry about which book your child is taking home - if we have concerns, we will let you know! All students progress at different times and we are super impressed by their growth and improvement so far this year. Reading at home should not be a challenge for students but instead, helping to develop a love of reading.

Finally, teachers are constantly monitoring your child’s progress and checking their reading in the classroom. We will do two reading assessments with your child next term. They will not change levels until that time. Please contact your teacher if you have any questions regarding home reading in Term 3.

What’s on in the Classroom?

Maths

We are:

- learning about ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.)

- ordering events in a day

- learning about duration

- practicing telling time to the hour and half hour

Literacy

We took part in National Simultaneous Storytime last week. Check out the Literacy page of this Newsletter to see some of our photos.

We are:

- revising and learning new sounds

- learning common words

- using our sounds to read simple sentences

- focusing on using finger spaces between every word in our sentences

- continuing to write about our families and our lives to make our own books

- retelling stories using the 5 Finger Retell

Here we are practicing adding finger spaces into sentences using pom poms:

Resilience Project

Throughout the term, we have been learning about how to be a good friend, how to be a good helper and what gratitude is. We have been talking about all the things we feel so lucky to have and all the things that can help make us happy. We encourage you to talk at home about what the best thing was each day and sharing things we are grateful for.

Here are some examples that students came up with in the classroom!