We have had a fun but busy term, with lots happening both in and out of our classroom. As we make our way towards the end of term it’s amazing to watch our young students set learning goals, practise giving and receiving feedback and challenge themselves to extend their skills, celebrating many terrific successes.

In our Sounds Write sessions, the Preps have continued to build their understanding of sounds, using this to become confident in reading and writing CVC words. The excitement has hit a new level this week as we begin building, reading and writing words with four sounds. The prep students are definitely embracing the challenge and their huge smiles when they successfully read and write the word shows how proud they are! The Grade Ones have continued to work through the extended code with Miss Lowe, extending their knowledge of two letters making one sound. Our daily fluency sessions have enabled the students to put their decoding skills to practise and it has been lovely watching the students supporting each other. We are completing our final text study for the term, ‘Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus’. The prep students have showed lots of excitement in our writing sessions as they begin to write sentences independently and the Grade Ones have worked hard to expand their sentences using the conjunctions ‘because’ and ‘but’.

Our numeracy sessions have been focused around building our number recognition to 20. Students have been busy reading, writing and comparing these numbers, becoming fluent in them. We have practised ordering numbers from smallest to biggest and biggest to smallest. Grade One students have applied their understanding of place value to partition numbers into their tens and ones.

Our inquiry unit ‘Growing Well’ is drawing to an end with students learning lots of interesting facts about the needs of plants. We have enjoyed working collaboratively with the Grade 1/2 class to learn and share our ideas. We are excited to apply our knowledge to make our own clay plant, modelling the different parts of a plant.

Our swimming program has almost come to an end with students showing lots of growth in swimming abilities and independence in getting themselves organised. A big thank you to the families for ensuring students come to school with everything they need! Lots of our students have loved being able to go to swimming lessons and build their confidence in the water.

The last few weeks have been very busy with mid-year assessment tasks and it has been wonderful to see the growth students have made this semester. We are all very much looking forward to showcasing our classroom and lots of our brilliant work at our upcoming Learning Showcase.

We have had a very exciting term of teaching and learning. A big thanks to all our families and school community who support us so wonderfully.

- Mrs Gray