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

Literacy in Foundation 

Over the past couple of weeks the Foundation students have been busy learning new letter sounds and their matching characters. So far they have learned four letter sets; msta, pifr, codh and engl with the final letter set kubj to be taught over the next few weeks. Nearly all the letters introduced have an action that goes along with the sound. This action helps the children to remember the sound. Ask them for a demonstration! 

InitiaLit is taught in a three lesson cycle: 

1: Introducing the new sound - meeting the new letter character and sound

2: Getting ready for reading and spelling using the new letter sound

3: Text reading and writing and introduction of new tricky words. 

Through our InitiaLit lessons we have been focusing on blending three and four letter sounds to read words. Students use a variety of actions such as words stretching and counting the sounds using their fingers which helps them isolate the letter sounds in words. 

We are continuing to learn new tricky words and regularly revise the tricky words already learned. Tricky Words should be practiced until they are automatically recognised as they cannot necessarily be sounded out like other words. Each new tricky word learned is added to our tricky word tree for the students to refer to and use when they complete writing tasks. 

We have also been learning the purpose of capital letters, when they are used and that they sometimes look different to lower case letters but still make the same phonetic sound. This supports the children subsequently using them when writing sentences and names of people and things.

During our literacy sessions, the children participate in small group activities and independent work which aligns with our InitiaLit lessons and has a focus on the letters taught. These include activities such as using the InitiaLitt sounds and words books, decodable readers, trick word memory games, word and sentence grab bags and letter sound based activities to consolidate their newly learned letter sound skills. They have also been using their InitiaLit sound boxes to spell three and four letter sound words.

We have been exploring the purpose and structure of Information Texts (non fiction), with a focus on the following features:

• Contents page
• Photos and labelled diagrams
• Headings
• Maps
• Text boxes
• Index page

Students have been discussing how Information Texts differ from picture story books and that they contain only facts. The children have thoroughly enjoyed exploring these texts and also had the opportunity to bring in their favourite information texts from home to share with the class and have enjoyed learning lots of new information and facts from animals to planets to robots!

We are continuing to practice our handwriting skills using our dotted thirds books. 

Students have been attempting to apply their knowledge of sounds and letters and are beginning to include some tricky words when completing their writing tasks. 

We have been learning about the purpose of recount writing and the important information that should be included in this genre of writing. Each Monday we have been completing recount writing by writing about something familiar to them - their weekend! They have been trying their best to sound out the letter sounds to write unknown words and have been trying their best and giving writing a go! We are very proud of their efforts. 

Swimming

Wow, what an amazing week we have had at swimming! The children were absolute superstars and all had a great time. We were very proud of each and every one of them as they displayed our school values of respect, responsibility and resilience! I’m sure they will be absolutely exhausted! 

Assembly

Next week the Foundation classes will have their very first Assembly on Monday 17th May at 3:00 in the Gym! It is very exciting for the children to finally have a 'proper' assembly. Everyone is welcome to attend and we look forward to seeing you there! 

Show and Tell

As part of our Speaking and Listening program, Show and Tell will commence in week 3 (next week) 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).

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) *