Term 3

Welcome Back

Welcome back to Term 3. We hope you all enjoyed a lovely break. This term is set to be another busy one, so please keep an eye on the classroom notice board and the blog. Just a reminder that student work sample books that were sent home with reports at the end of last term need to be returned.

Literacy

Our focus for literacy for the coming weeks is:

Week 1: Initial blends: tw and qu and revision of initial blends. Sight words: them, then, made. Spelling: a, I, can, see.

Week 2: End blends: ft. Sight words: when, which, water. Spelling: is, it, the at.

Week 3: End blends: mp. Sight words: make, only, into. Spelling: look, dad, in, like.

Numeracy

Week 1: Ways to make 6 e.g. 3 and 3 make 6, 4 and 2 make 6. Addition within 5. Naming 2 dimensional shapes e.g. circle, square, triangle, rectangle.

Week 2: Ways to make 7 e.g. 3 and 4 make 7, 5 and 2 make 7. Counting the sides and corners on 2 dimensional shapes e.g. a square has 4 sides and 4 corners.

Week 3: Ways to make 8 e.g. 4 and 4 make 8, 5 and 3 make 8. Sorting 2 dimensional shapes based on their attributes e.g. size and colour

Other Learning Areas

Our focus in Science this term is Physical Sciences. This involves learning about how the size and shape of an object affects how it moves e.g. roll, spin, slide, bounce.

Our focus in Health this term is Protective Behaviours. The students will learn about their feelings and how to recognise safe and unsafe situations.

Our focus in Physical Education this term is learning how to control an object such as a ball through catching, throwing and kicking. This term, the students will also participate in a Kindy and Pre-primary tabloid day and running races at the Whole School Sports Carnival.

NAIDOC Week

During week 2, the whole school will be celebrating NAIDOC Week. There will be an assembly and the students will also participate in a range of activities in the classroom and with our buddy classes.

P&C Disco

The P&C are commencing preparations for the upcoming school disco. Events like this require a lot of support and the disco will not be able to go ahead without parent volunteers. At this stage, the disco is scheduled for Friday 13^th September. If you can help out on the night, please let your classroom teacher know and we can pass your information on to the P&C.

  

Faction T-shirts

This term, students are allowed to wear their coloured faction t-shirts to school on a Friday. If your child does not have a faction t-shirt, these are available for purchase from the uniform shop. If you do not know what faction your child is in, please see your classroom teacher.

‘No Throw’ Tuesday

Wattle Grove is a sustainable school. For this reason, we try and encourage the students to have minimal waste. Every Tuesday is ‘No Throw’ Tuesday. Each class gets a point for every student that brings a lunch box with no plastic rubbish. Please help to support your child to have a waster free lunch box.

End of Term 2

The following are some concepts that we have been learning this semester. You may wish to revise some of these concepts over the upcoming holidays. We wish all our families a safe and enjoyable holiday with their children. The children are on holiday break from Monday 8 July, with children returning on Tuesday 23^rd July.

Numeracy

Number stories- we have continued revising addition and subtraction number stories. Children use counters to represent the items stated in the number story. They are then asked to draw a picture to represent the number story, before writing it as a sum.

Doubles- We have also been learning about doubles to 10. I.e. double 1 is 2, double 2 is 4, and double 3 is 6.

Days of the week-The children have enjoyed learning the days of the weeks. Ask them to sing you the song (it’s sure to get stuck in your head.)

Revising numbers 1-20.  Children are encouraged to read write and say numbers to 20. They are also encouraged to recognise numbers that come before or after a given number.

English

Handwriting- This term the children have been working hard during handwriting to form upper and lower case letters with the correct formation. 

Adjectives- adjectives are words that describe a noun. The children have been adding adjectives to sentences to make them sound more interesting. I.e. The spider was in the web. Add adjective, the black spider was in the web. 

Sight words-We continue to revise all introduced sight words including reading, golden, red, blue and green words.  The children are expected to read these words in isolation and are now beginning to recognise them with in sentences.

Phonics- We have focused this term on blends. A blend is two sounds that blend together, you can hear both sounds. The children are expected to read words by blending these sounds together.

i.e.      bl-a-b    bl-o-b  sl-u-g  pl-u-g

Reports 

Each child will be receiving a written report. These will come home on Thursday 4/7/19.

Week 7 and 8

Week 7 and 8

Literacy

Week 7 – the initial blends this week are gr, pr and dr. The sight words are: from, out, just. These are the first 3 green words.

Week 8 – the initial blends this week are sk and st. The sight words are: my, said, do.

It would be a good idea to review the Golden, Red and Blue sight words at home with your child.

It is very important that your child returns their sight word folder on the allocated day. Keylinks Guided Reading books also need to be returned each week, as we have many that have not been returned.

Numeracy

Week 7 – we are learning the number 18. We are focusing on taking apart numbers to 5, for example: There are _____ fruit. 3 are apples. ____ are bananas.

We are also revising the days of the week and learning about the months of the year.

Week 8 – we are learning the number 19. We will begin to learn about subtraction (taking away) within 5. We will continue revising the days of the week and months of the year. We will begin to learn about how many days are in each month.

Science

In Science we have been learning about the needs of plants. We did an experiment where we are trying to grow bean seeds: 1 = no water, 1 = no sunlight, 1 = no soil and 1 = water, sunlight and soil. Which one do you think will grow? We will be making plants out of craft materials and labelling the parts of the plant e.g. seed, stem, roots, leaves and flower.

T&E

In T&E we are starting to design our scarecrows. Each class will vote on a design and that is the scarecrow the whole class will build. The scarecrows are part of a competition being run by the Perth Royal Show. One of the conditions is that the scarecrow has to be made completely from recycled materials. If you have anything at home that you could donate e.g. hats, shirts, overalls, boots, straw, old brooms, pillowcases, stuffing, beanbags etc, we would really appreciate your help.

Incursions

Most classes have already attended the Constable Care incursion. It was excellent and the students really enjoyed it. During Week 7, classes will attend the RAC Road Safety Incursion. If you have not returned your child’s permission slips, please do so as soon as possible.

Week 5 & 6

Literacy

The focus in literacy during week 5 and 6 continues to be initial blends. Our focus blends in week 5 were gl as in glow, globe, glove and pl as in planet, plant, plop. Week 6 blends are br as in brag, bring and gr as in grip, grey.  We continue to revise all golden and red words. Our focus sight words are blue words, he, be, but, did, who and been.

Numeracy

Our focus in numeracy currently is on addition number stories up to the value of 5. An example of this is, if I had 1 blue pencil and 3 red pencils, how many pencils do I have altogether. Children can then represent this number story with a number bond i.e.

Below is a link for some Mathematics games that could be played at home with your child.

https://www.education.wa.edu.au/documents/43634991/0/PRE_PRIMARY_NUMBERS_IDEAS.pdf/3fea4b75-4949-597e-5dd4-c82c3e6caaa0

Incursion permission slips

Please ensure you have returned the permission slips for your child to attend the upcoming incursions by Constable Care and RAC. These will be held during weeks 6 and 7.

Concepts addressed are; 
· Safe walking - road crossing, using footpaths and finding a safe route, 
· Bike safety - using bikepaths, direction signalling
· Road safety - school drop off areas, exiting cars safety, school zones, safe speeds and seatbelts.

What's happening in Room 5

Literacy

Phonics:

This term, we are focusing on developing our phonics knowledge.

We have learnt double consonants and the consonant digraph ‘ck’, as in duck.

This week we are beginning to learning about letter blends.  Each letter is pronounced individually, but quickly, so the letters blend together.  We say...

“2 consonants the blend together, you hear both sounds”

You can see how important it is for our students to have a solid grasp of their single sounds as we transition into the next phase of our phonics teaching.    

Sight Words: 

We are now teaching the ‘blue’ set of words.  So far we have taught:

on, her, was, have, you, by

Mathematics

The students are enjoying learning mathematical concepts and skills through many hands-on experiences using objects and counters as well as the engaging PRIME Big Books.  These big books provide our students with visual representations and explore problem solving strategies too. 

Recently we have been measuring the capacity of containers and learning how to partition the numbers 4 and 5. 

Number bonds are the ways in which a whole number can be split into parts.  We are exploring and recording the different combinations.  For example:

Dress Fancy Day

Many thanks to everyone for dressing Fancy on Friday 10th May.  It was a fundraiser for our graduating classes this year.

 

    

WGPS App

If you have an iphone or android phone, you may be interested in downloading our school app.  Search ‘Wattle Grove Primary School’ on the Apple App Store or Google Play and download for free!  Features of the app include:

· Link to the school blog

· Term planners

· School newsletter

· Canteen orders

· Absentee form

· Contact the school

Being Resilient 

Recently we’ve started discussing ways and strategies to develop resilience when things get us down or don’t go our way. 

Being resilient means that you are able to bounce back from adversity in order to lead a happy lifestyle.  Resiliency strategies are not only important for children but for adults as well, as there are many situations on a day to day basis that can present a challenge or effect your mood. 

Strategies that we’ve talked about include:

· Talking to someone about your feelings or problem

· Walk away and come back to it later

· Laugh and shake it off

· Take deep breaths

· Think about what you could do differently next time

· Think positively

Having a variety of resiliency strategies allows children to develop some good social skills and the ability to deal with challenging situations. 

Welcome Back to Term 2

Welcome back for another fantastic term. We hope you had a lovely Easter break.

Literacy

Week 1 

The phonics focus for this week in literacy has been double consonants, ll, ff, ss, zz. Children learnt that when we read a double consonant i.e. 'ss' we just make the one sound i.e. hiss h-i-ss. Our sight words for Week 1 - they, and, were.

Week 2  

We are focusing on  Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words i.e. cat, leg, big. We are also learning about nouns - nouns are naming words for a person, place or thing.  Week 2 sight words - on, was, her.

Numeracy

This week we have started to learn about volume. We focused on the language of volume including more than, less than, full and empty. We also learnt about the different ways of making 4 ie 2 and 2 more,  3 and 1 more ,  4 and 0 more.

Mothers day stall

Our wonderful P&C are holding their annual mothers day stall until Friday 10th May. Located outside of the BER learning center and in the undercover area in the mornings from 8:15am-8:45am and in the afternoons from 3:05pm-3:35pm. Gifts range from $1 -$7. Raffle tickets are $2 for the hamper.

Class photos

Midland photography has informed us that school photos should be ready for distribution next week.

'Dress Fancy Day'

A note has come home regarding free dress for Friday 10th May. Children who participate need to bring in a gold coin donation to go towards the year 6 fundraiser.

STEM

On our first day back this term, we completed a STEM challenge. The students had to work in pairs to build a bridge from Lego. The bridge had to be long enough to cross the river, and wide and strong enough to hold a Lego person. We had so much fun making our bridges. 

Room 3 and Room 5 Assembly

Room 3 and Room 5 will be presenting the Junior Assembly on Friday 17th May. The theme for our assembly is road safety, so students need to bring a helmet as part of their costume, and where bright coloured clothes. Some children will have a speaking part at the Assembly. If your child has a speaking part, they will bring it home in their reading file. Please help them to learn to say their part without reading.

Week 9

Excursion

This Thursday is our excursion to the Constable Care Safety School. All students need to be dressed in school uniform with their hat. They need to wear closed in shoes, no sandals please. Please pack your child's recess snacks in a zip-lock bag clearly labelled with your child's name. Please ensure their water bottles are also clearly labelled. We are eating recess at the Safety School but we will be back at Wattle Grove PS for lunch. If there is rain predicted for Thursday, the excursion will go ahead. If it looks like rain, please pack a raincoat for your child.

Please arrive at school at 8.30 as the bus leaves at 9 a.m.

In Literacy

We are revising the single sounds Z, W, and Q and the red words: if, so and that.

In Numeracy

We are talking about numbers that come after or before a given number. We are measuring the weight of objects by using balance scales. 

In STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)

We are continuing our work on the dioramas to represent the seasons.

Reminders

Just a reminder that next Tuesday is the parent interviews. The students will need to be collected at 12.00 p.m. You should have now received a note regarding the time of your interview. Each interview will be 10 minutes. Please be on time, as often interviews are scheduled back-to-back. We look forward to discussing your child's progress.