Week 2 Term 2 2021

 Good morning parents, 

I hope you have had a lovely long weekend!  Just a few reminders for the remainder of this week...

Homework due this week and new set for Week 3/4 Term 2 

Just a friendly reminder that homework is due tomorrow - please bring them to school to help us review and set up for next fortnight.   If you have any questions or queries, please don't hesitate to contact me. Also a request that you remember to complete the reading log each night after your child has read aloud for ten minutes to help us know whether to change books or not and how your child is progessing with their nightly reading.  Spelling and fluency grids (these will look a little different to last term now we have begun the InitiaLit1 program but remain the same process as last term being a timed read with accuracy and time recorded) will continue to be glued into your child's scrapbook each fortnight.  These words are for your child to practise reading and spelling on a piece of paper and they align with the phonics/spelling/reading teaching content of our InitiaLit1 program for the next fortnight.  

Reading at home We are noticing that fluency growth (increasing their reading words per minute) remains difficult for some students and encourage them to re-read the text in their home reader a second time after each double page spread to help work on increasing their reading speed as well as extra work on the words on the fluency grid as research has shown that this is an influential part of reading growth and literacy success.  This is a method we are using during daily guided reading and small group reading sessions with our decodable readers and InitiaLit Sounds and Words books. We encourage students to sound out loud unkonwn words first (no random guessing) then practise joining the sounds together faster each sub-sequential read to develop fluency rather than just guessing unknown longer words, working on maintaining accuracy as well as speed.  

Spelling focus long a and long e graphemes - ai and ay, ea and ee.    As a general pattern ai is used when we hear the long a sound in the middle of a word and ay is used at the end of a word or the first syllable.  Of course with English, this is not necessarily a rule that is always followed but knowing this can help your child identify which grapeme - ai or ay is used when spelling.  We will learn about the a-e long vowel grapheme (also sometimes known as magic e) later in the term but feel free to acknowledge and show your child that there are also other ways we can write the long a sound in words such as grape, late, snake.  Please note that ea and ee doesn't have a rule as such, and students just need to learn which grapheme to use for which word and if it looks right.  Bonus fun fact - ea/ee are graphemes often used in homophones which are words that sound the same and have different meanings to help us identify which word we mean eg. meet/meat, beech, beach, sea/see. 

Our spelling tests and daily spelling lessons have identified some having trouble spelling their tricky word so if you could give these particular words (and any previous tricky words from earlier homework spelling lists that your child had trouble with) a little extra practise each night, they will experience even more success in their everyday writing at school and weekly spelling tests results.

Merit Award

Congratulations to Avalon who was the Week 1 Merit Award Winner. Avalon is new to OLC and we have loved getting to know you over the last two weeks. We feel very lucky to have you in our class. 

Newstelling

Newstelling will begin on Monday with bags being sent home to the first children on the roster for the fortnightly rotation.  Your child will be nominated and your child will bring home a newstelling bag the day before to help them prepare and bring to school.  Newstelling is a great opportunity for the students to practise speaking formally for a few minutes to their peers but conducted in an informal and welcoming setting at the end of each day.  We will begin with a free-choice topic of anything at all that they student would like to share and talk about with the class for a a few minutes.  If a bag is forgotten to be bought to school it is okay, your child will be able to do it the following day or when it is next returned and be aware that newstelling is completely optional as we ensure the speaking and listening part of the curriculum is covered each day within our literacy and other area learning. 

We do ask that nothing valuable or extremely fragile is bought to school and that other rule is that the object must be able to fit inside the cotton bag.  Students are more than welcome to just speak and please be aware that no object is needed at all and you can can use a photo that can be emailed to me if this is an easy option for you.  Within the newstelling bags you will find a prompt sheet and a texta that you may help your child write some key words if they wish.

Skip counting fun!

The last few weeks we have been working hard to learn how to skip count a large number or objects by a repeated count of twos, fives or tens.  We have had fun rap singing skip counting songs (there are some interesting dancers too...), using Mrs King's stamps to stamp groups of two, five and ten, completing skip counting ladders and grids too!  We have loved learning how to order the skip counting sequence popsticks and challenging ourselves against a friend or working together to try some more challenging on Level 2 skip counting sequences.  We also had some outdoors time with 1C having a go at putting our skip counting knowledge to the test in a factions relay race.

Thank you for your ongoing support and assistance, 

Penny and Gemma