Prep News
The Daily 5
The Prep children have been introduced to the Daily 5 program. This is a research based literacy framework that guides both student and teacher behaviours to create a classroom of engaged and independent readers and writers.
The Daily 5 is a way of structuring the classroom reading program so every student is independently involved in meaningful literacy tasks.
The Daly 5 consists of:
- Read to Self
- Listen to Reading
- Read to Someone
- Work with Words
- Work on Writing
On Monday we were lucky enough to have a visit from Mrs Purton who introduced the Prep children to Word Work.
During Word Work, students experiment with spelling patterns, memorize high-frequency words, and develop a genuine curiosity for and interest in new and unique words. By playing with words, word patterns, word families, prefixes, suffixes, and so on, students hone their knowledge of words and increase their speaking and writing skills.
The Preps loved exploring the new activities Mrs Purton shared with us!
Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony
It was wonderful for the BNPS staff and students to experience a Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony this week.
The students, encircling the ceremony, all watched on in awe as David Tournier shared with us the meaning of a smoking ceremony, which had been passed down to him from his father.
David selected three trees of significance to use in the ceremony. He chose the gum tree to signify diversity, wattle for its versatility and the last tree, cherry ballart was selected because, like our students, in order to thrive it needs to be protected and sheltered.
The Preps all thoroughly enjoyed walking through the smoke as an act of cleansing the spirit after a challenging two years. We were all so proud of Summer for being a risk taker and sharing her Welcome to Country with the school.
Afterwards the Preps all had time to reflect on the experience through drawing.
PMP
Over the past three weeks our Prep students have enjoyed taking part in the Perceptual Motor Program (PMP). Based at school, the PMP is a movement-based program which helps younger students improve their eye/hand and eye/foot coordination, fitness, balance, locomotion and eye-tracking skills.
The program uses a variety of equipment and focuses on engaging the students in fun, semi-intensive activities.
A big thankyou to the P.E. team for facilitating this important (and at times hectic) program!