Year Prep - Year 2

Assistant Principal's Report

Junior School News

Hello and welcome back to Week Four of Term Three!  We're now into the last month of winter so hopefully, some warmer days are not too far away!  This fortnight has been another one of great excitement and achievement at Pakenham Springs with plenty to celebrate.  This week also saw our first Step-into-Prep session run which was exciting to see with nearly 100 Kindergarten students turning out for their first experience at school.  From all reports, the students had a wonderful time and certainly, the parent feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. 

These past two weeks have also been incredibly exciting for our current Prep students.  First of all, they celebrated 100 days of being at school last Tuesday and celebrated in style!  Students came dressed in all kinds of fancy outfits with collections of 100 items stapled or glued on and then came together for some fabulous class parties. All students came together and practised counting to 100 by popping 100 balloons and threading 100 fruit loops to make a necklace. The following day also saw them head out of the school for an excursion to Cranbourne Gardens where they learned all about Aboriginal culture and history.  The students enjoyed making paint using traditional methods and learning about how Aboriginals used plants for food as well as creating shelter and materials such as boomerangs and baskets that were essential for survival.

The Year One Team have been busy redesigning their Reading planners to reflect our new schoolwide comprehension strategies that came out of our Curriculum Day back at the start of term.   Currently, there is a big focus on determining importance within a text and using the features of an information text to locate information that is particularly important.   In Numeracy, they are in the process of shifting their focus from addition to subtraction and exploring how they are inverse operations and how their understanding of addition can support them in learning about subtraction.

Year Two's similarly have redesigned their Reading planners and currently have a focus on making connections with the texts that they read, thinking about how they link with the world or remind them of personal experiences.   In Numeracy, a strong focus on teaching strategies for multiplication remains a focus for them, which will lead to their next unit of work on division.   Please make sure you ask your children in Year Two about multiplication, what it means, which strategies they have learned and how they can model a multiplication problem.

Hopefully when I write next, the weather will be looking up, but you can be sure that, even in the absence of sunshine, our super learners at Pakenham Springs will be shining brightly!

Until next time, take care

Regards

Danny Forster 

Assistant Principal in Junior School