News from Prep

We are lucky enough to have Sophie Wasson with us for the next 6 weeks as she completes her final placement with Australian Catholic University.

Sophie, Talia and I have had a lot of fun coming up with a multitude of creative ideas to keep everyone engaged and learning.

Continuing our Fairytale theme, we have added Jack and the Beanstalk and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to our study of narratives.

We made beanstalks that Jack actually climbed up and threaded a golden harp.

This literary focus lends itself to a multitude of skills.

We practised rewriting the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, using pictures as prompts. 

We introduced alphabetical order by the first letter only. I was surprised how quickly the children caught on to this concept. I should not have been, as they are so good at being able to sing the alphabet song!

We continued with nouns, sorting the different nouns into person, place or thing. 

We also focused on punctuation, differentiating between when to use a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark. 

We sequenced the stories according to the pictures and made a Venn diagram comparing Snow White and the Queen. The children came up with excellent attributes that were different and those that were the same.

We read statements about each story and had to identify whether they were true or false. 

In our Literacy block, we also looked at singular and plural words and what we need to add to a singular word to make it plural, eg mop-mops.

In Spelling, we have been studying words that end in double letters, -ff, -ll, -zz, as in cuff, bell and buzz. We have also been concentrating on the middle sound of words. We had a tricky activity where the children had to paste the picture under the correct heading according to the middle sound they heard. They did a great job.

Mirror Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? The children were provided with a magnificent cut out mirror designed by Talia, and the children did a fabulous job decorating their mirrors with stick on gems.

In Maths, we have been studying length and the terminology used when describing it, for example, long, longer and longest.

We measured ourselves using formal and informal units of measurement. We measured our height in traditional centimetres, unifix blocks, icy pole sticks and hand spans. Come to our classroom and see the fantastic display on the end walls of the verandah. 

Unfortunately, the storm on Thursday night took away one side and we are still collecting bits from around the yard.

In Inquiry, we explained to the children that when it doesn't rain for a long time, the water in dams and rivers can dry up, leaving no water for the animals that live there. 

We showed these pictures of before and after a drought. 

We considered different ways that we use water at home and shared our ideas with the rest of the class for example, showers/baths, brushing our teeth and washing the car.

We then looked at how we might save water at home, for example, taking shorter showers, not leaving the tap on while brushing your teeth and washing the car with a bucket instead of spraying a hose. The video below helped us to explore some of these ideas.

Milton, our class pet, has been continuing to visit the children and having lots of interesting adventures.

We are all so happy to be back together and to be able to say goodbye to Zoom.

Kind regards

Mrs Margaret Maher

Prep Classroom Teacher