Week 7 Term 1 2021

Hello parents!

This is the big week - swimming week! Get ready for some excited and soon to be very tired kids all week!  Some reminder details in addition to those I shared last week's blog post include:

Swimming Lessons

Swimming commences Week 7 (Monday March 15^th to Friday 19^th March).

The children may wear their sports uniform from the entire week with their bathers under their uniform. The boys often like to wear their boardies under their school school shorts so that they are ready to go. If your girls have difficulty going to the toilet in their bathers, please teach them an easy way/method depending on their bathers type or if this is difficult, we can get them changed at recess if they would prefer. If your child is wearing a rashie, please bring it separately, as they can be hot under their uniform and this is an easy change at school.  They will need to wear sneakers and socks to school each day and pack thongs in their swimming bag ready to swap over just after recess break at school.  

This year the children will have 2x 40 minute lessons. In between the blocks there will be a 10 minute break where we will only have time for toilets and a quick snack break which they will eat their recess food. We will be leaving OLC at 11:40am and returning by around 2:30pm.

We will be eating our lunch food at recess time at school instead and I will ensure that we go out five/ten minutes early each day so that they have enough time to eat and play. Unfortunately no canteen orders will be available in week seven as we will not be at school at lunch time. Please ensure to label all water and containers as they get lost very easily in the trips to and from school.

Please bring their towel, goggles and a spare plastic bag (for wet bathers) in either a separate sports bag/reusable bag or a thick plastic bag which will hang outside on their bag hook until our swimming time.  We will undress at school, leaving our uniform and school shoes on our chairs and wear our bathers and thongs to the pool, carrying our swimming bags that will contain our bathers, goggles, water bottles and recess lunch boxes.  

Please label everything - uniforms, containers and waterbottles - it is really easy to lose belongings this week and the children rarely are aware what their unlabelled belongings like or claim them.

Parent Teacher Interviews week 8 and 9 (timetable to be emailed for booking slots soon, please let me know if these weeks will not be suitable and we can organise a time this week.)

1K Learning

We have continued with our InitiaLit reading lessons and begun small group differentiated reading and spelling groups as well.  We have focused on the concept of number and different ways we can add parts together to make a whole.  Our learning this week will continue to develop on our number sense understandings, moving onto decomposing whole numbers in the form of subtraction number sentences.

In science we have been learning about sound.  We have learnt that sound is energy and it travels through air particles in waves into our ears.  Sound is caused by vibrations and movement.  We have learnt that sounds can change depending on the objects that make the sound and the objects around us.  We did an experiment with the sound of our voices travelling through air and travelling through solid objects such as string, making cup telephones.  

Homework and Home Reading

Homework is due this week. Please make sure that books are returned on Friday so that we are able to set up the following fortnight's set.  Please also remember that home reading books are swapped on Wednesday and Friday mornings so if they are forgotten it is difficult to swap them on alternative days.  

Gemma and I have had the opportunity to listen to all of the students individually read to us and assess their current abilities and determine their needs and individual reading goals for the next month.  We are so proud of the confidence and persistence they have shown in tackling difficult texts, many of which were hard work and gave their reading brains a really good workout!

  Many of our students goals include working on ensuring they are creating a mental image/picture/movie in their head as they read to ensure that they are fully comprehending the home reader texts.  Some other students are working on reading aloud and acknowledging the punctuation marks and reading aloud phrases and using expression appropriately. It is important that we continue to build their vocabulary and encourage students to question texts they read especially when they come across new words and can't imagine the new vocabulary as they read.

 It is important that students do not guess unknown words and rather use their decoding (sounding out and blending together) skills and an adult to assist them to work out tricky words especially if they contain phonic sounds they have not explicitly learned yet.  Current reading research has shown that encouraging guessing by using pictures can reduce the progress of reading skills later on when students begin to experience longer texts that do not contain many picture prompts.  

All students have now been moved to an appropriate text level that suits their child's current reading abilities but it is important that they continue to read aloud to you for ten minutes each night and you encourage them to answer questions, summarise what is happening or notice new words as they read, to ensure that they are also understanding what they read.  Some publisher brands and sets seem to be easier or much harder than others despite the same levelled number and some home reader books take a different approach to reading methods which can sometimes clash with our Science of Reading approach that we use at school and in our InitiaLit reading program.  Please feel free to continue to let us know if they continue to be too easy/hard or new vocabulary and phonic sound that they had trouble with so we can continue to monitor their progress.

Phew! I think that's all for now.  Please don't hesitate to email me if you have any questions at all. 

Thank you for your continued support and assistance.

Kind regards,

Penny and Gemma