Term 3

Dear Parents,

Welcome back to Term 3. We hope the holidays were relaxing and the children managed to get outside and enjoy the sunny days we had.

In this first week of term we will be revisiting our Learning How to Learn program and reminding the children about our classroom plans and goals for the term.

Our Inquiry Learning question this term is ‘How do we imagine and create new things?’ with a focus on recycling, designing, creating and evaluating things that we make.

We will continue our maths work on counting and place value, as well as working on the four operations and how they are linked. Non-Number sessions will focus on estimating mass and time, as well as exploring 2D and 3D shapes and their properties.

Reading and writing sessions will continue to be aimed at your child’s ability level and we will look primarily at procedural text and explanations, whilst continuing our work on recounts and narrative writing. We ask you to continue reading at home with your child to practise skills taught in the classroom reading sessions, with a focus on discussing the book read (plot, characters etc). The books that come home in the reading folder are designed to be easy for your child to read so that the experience is enjoyable. The focus is not so much on how many nights your child is reading (4 nights a week being the minimum) but on how valuable the discussion about the book is after reading. Often children choose the same book on more than one occasion. This is quite okay as children develop favorites and will pick up new ideas and develop fluency and phrasing when they revisit a book. They may also bring home longer books which may take several nights to read.

The mid-year reports for all children have been distributed and we hope you read through these with your child to discuss the contents and areas for future learning. Student/teacher/parent conferences will also occur this term to set goals for the remainder of the year. Information regarding these will be sent home shortly.

At the end of last term there were quite a number of unclaimed items of clothing which have now gone to lost property near the office. Unfortunately as they were un-named we were unable to return them to their owners! Please ensure that your child’s clothing is clearly named to avoid this problem.

It is wonderful to see so many children bringing fruit to school for our fruit break at 10am. Could you please send this fruit cut up (except for apples) as we are finding a lot of wastage is occurring due to children discarding a large proportion of their fruit. This also means we can quickly eat our fruit and move onto the next learning activity.

Thank you to all those parents who are ensuring their children are at school by 8.45 to enable us to start classes at 8.55. It is important that your child feels organized and not rushed for the beginning of their school day. Please assist us by continuing to value the importance of an early start.

Your child is welcome to bring a pair of slippers/ugg boots for inside use at school. This also assists us with avoiding dirty carpet during the wet weather. (This also keeps Mr Boxer smiling!)

Please feel free to make an appointment to speak with your child’s class teacher if you have any queries or concerns.

Thanks,

Sharon, Liz, Katie, Nicole, Sharyn and Michaela

Year 1/2 teachers

Dates for the diary:

• Wednesday 21^st August – Parent/Child/Teacher Conferences