Term 3 Week 10

Hello,

We hope that the Preps enjoyed the Carnival Day on Friday. Congratulations to blue house on your win.

Tuesday 15th September

Our current unit of inquiry has the central idea 'Cycles are a part of the natural world'. To support the Preps' learning we will be attending a virtual excursion with the staff at the Melbourne Zoo on Tuesday. Please see the post on Compass for login details.

Thursday 17th September

The Prep team have our end of term planning day. This is where we plan for the following term and organise events. The activities prepared for this day will have an animal theme to follow up on Tuesday's virtual excursion to the zoo. There will not be any Google Meets on this day.

Danielle currently has a student teacher doing a placement with her. This week rather than seeing Danielle's name on activities you will see Cynthia's. Cynthia is preparing lessons under Danielle's guidance.

Codes

This week we will be revising codes learnt throughout the term. On Monday students can practise saying the codes as per usual. Your child can always watch this video again if they want to keep practising throughout the week and over the holidays. Then they will practise being able to write the code to match the sound/s.

This week we continue boot camping the rule - c will say it’s second sound ‘s’ if the next letter is e, i or y’, and we will introduce the rule - g MAY say its second sound /j/ if the next letter is e, i or y. There will be a continuation of the story (Gentle Cindy Giant Cendric) to help them tune into this rule. One thing to take note of is the ‘c rule’ has the word will as this always happens whereas the ‘g rule’ says may as there are some words that don’t follow this rule e.g. the word girl. All rules can be used when reading and spelling however for these rules we are going to use the reading tools during the boot camp lessons.

Literacy

This week in literacy we are going to continue our focus on characters. We will be looking at more interesting ways of describing how a character is feeling and how facial expression and the words in books are both used to communicate these feelings.

We will be recapping and continuing our story about Gentle Cindy and Giant Cedric to reinforce the boot camp rule of the week that ‘g’ sometimes says ‘j’ when followed by e, i or y. The stories, pictures and actions that go with some codes and rules are designed to help children remember them. Please encourage your child to draw the new earring on Gentle Cindy or Giant Cedric that they drew last week and have the picture near by when they are completing their activity as a prompt.

We continue our focus on high frequency words this week with some hidden words to find and read. If your child is confident in reading the words, you could increase the level of difficulty by asking them to turn away from the screen and spell the words as well, this is the next step in learning.

Numeracy

This week we will continue using the terminology associated with Time and the units used to measure it. We will be considering why we have day and night. The Preps will have the opportunity to try and model this. Modelling a concept and explaining what they are doing supports the transfer of information into long term memory. The Preps will also be ordering events by their duration. For example, it would take longer to have a bath than clean your teeth. Another aspect of time that is a learning goal in the Victoria Curriculum is making links between events and the days upon which they occur. We will focus on that again when we return to school as at present this is challenging with the days all being quite similar.

Later in the week we will link our learning about time with animals and consider nocturnal and diurnal animals.

On the day with the best weather (currently Wednesday) we will be making a very simple sundial to reinforce the idea of the Earth moving rather than the sun.

Unit of Inquiry

We have a very exciting week coming up for Unit of Inquiry. On Tuesday the students will be going on a virtual excursion to The Melbourne Zoo. They will become ‘Wild Explorers’ by discovering the natural world around them. They will uncover animals' features, habitats, life cycles and what they need to survive. Students will exercise their sense of wonder as they uncover clues as to what makes animals special. The excursion will help support their curiosity as we continue to look at life cycles. Please refer to the email that was sent to ensure you are ready for the Webex excursion prior to the day. The excursion will commence at 12pm sharp.

Well being

The Preps are often weary in the last week of term and after this most unusual term may be even more so. With this in mind we have modified the activities for this week. We have kept the routine the same, as this can be reassuring, but have made the activities less structured. We hope this helps.

We hope that the extra hour of exercise starting tomorrow

The Prep team

0A - Kathryn Morrison

kathryn.morrison@education.vic.gov.au

0B - Deb Barden

deborah.barden@education.vic.gov.au

0C - Danielle Palombi

danielle.palombi@education.vic.gov.au

0D - Julie Daniel

julie.daniel@education.vic.gov.au

HU - Krystle Horadam

krystle.horadam@education.vic.gov.au

Prep Fortnightly Snapshot

Issue 18 · 13 Sep 2020

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