We have had an exciting start to school life in Preschool.  What a wonderful year we have ahead!  Our teachers and educators are getting to know the children, families and developing our learning spaces for the year ahead. Our four Preschool classes have voted to choose a local animal from Ngunnawal country to have as their class name.  We are…

Mon/Tues/(Wed):  

• Mrs Punch & Ms Meredith    Gang-gang Cockatoos (‘Gang-gangs’)
• Ms Lay & Mrs Reid              Eastern Long-necked Turtles (‘Turtles’)

(Wed)/Thurs/Fri:  

• Mrs Punch & Mrs Simi         Brush-tailed Rock Wallabies (‘Rock Wallabies’)
• Ms Lay & Mrs Reid              Wombats

There are so many experiences to be had at Preschool - routines to get to know, friendships and relationships to be developed.  Favourite activities so far have included outdoor play, especially water play, playdough, drawing, painting, constructing, puzzles, singing, reading and exploring our obstacle course.

Kindergarten has been full of lots of smiles, laughter and fun over the past 3 weeks! Slowly, we have been getting to know our school by visiting different buildings and classrooms. We even did a scavenger hunt of different places to help us know where to go!

Picturebooks are one of our favourite ways to learn new things! ‘Beautiful Oops’ by Andrea Beaty helped us to learn about our Growth Mindset expectations and to keep on trying when things get hard or when we make mistakes. We have also been reading the book ‘Have you Filled a Bucket Today?’ by Carol McCloud to learn about our Respect expectations and being kind to people.

As part of our inquiry for ‘How we organise ourselves’ we were fortunate to have Kenny Koala visiting us to help us learn about being safe and making safe choices. 

Year 1 has had a great start to the year. We have all been embracing our Growth Mindset while exploring new learning spaces, new expectations and new classmates to get to know. 

As part of our exploration of Grown Mindset we have been reading the book ‘The Magical Yet' by Angela DiTerlizzi and Lorena Alvarez Gomez. This is a wonderful book that reminds us all that we can’t be good at everything and there is power in continuing to try to do something until you can do it. What are you still working on?

We have started explicit phonics learning and have been really successful with finding our focus sounds in words. We have been brainstorming them in class and learners have been coming in every day asking to add more words to the lists. We have daily lessons that include oral and written work as well as engaging movement breaks. 

In our Unit of Inquiry “How We Express Ourselves” we have been exploring different ways of expressing ourselves, with reference to illustrations in picture books. We have made pet rocks inspired by ‘Thing’ by Robin Klein and Alison Lester. We have also started to explore how Indigenous people use art to tell stories. We have enjoyed reading “Shapes of Australia” and “Super Snake” and discussing the illustrations and how they help to express the story.

In Maths, we have been reviewing our knowledge of numbers and friends to ten. We have been learning lots of new games to get our brains firing and remembering these number facts quickly.

If I know that 6 + 4 = 10, this will help me to learn 40 + 60 = 10 or 24 + 6 = 30 etc. 

Year 2 have been working hard and have settled in well to their new classes. The teachers have been impressed with the GROW expectations students have displayed with being Organised and using a Growth mindset to settle into the new classes and making new learning friends. We have created our own class expectations after reflecting on what we know about Growth mindset, Respect, Organisation and Wellbeing (GROW). 

Year 2 also had a special visitor to the building, Kenny Koala! He came to talk to us about staying safe online. This visit was linked with our Unit of inquiry, Who we are. Our central idea is ‘our choices impact wellbeing’. We have been looking at strategies to help us stay safe and ways we can help, as well as identifying adults we can trust when we need help.

During our maths inquiries we have been investigating numbers to 1000. We have been looking at number lines and using MAB blocks to partition numbers. We have been playing lots of games to help build our knowledge and it has been a lot of fun!