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Wheeler Heights Public School
36 Veterans Parade Collaroy Plateau NSW 2097 Phone: 9971 8352
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What we are learning
School years Kindergarten
Maximise Learning: Get Involved
Help your child learn
In order to maximise your child's learning it is very powerful to discuss and reinforce classroom learning at home. Below is an indication of the major learning that our classes are covering each term with some suggested activities and resource that you may like to draw on to reinforce skills and concepts at home.
Kindy Notes and Newsletters What we are learning
When discussing what has been covered during the week, please remember two things:
KW Class page
1. 'Nothing' is a common answer (especially as the kids get older!) but it is not actually accurate as our days are packed with activities and learning!'
KT Class page
2. Most psychologists agree that the most powerful way to commit information to memory is to teach it to someone else (see the pyramid at right). So give your child the chance to 'teach' you what they have learnt - be interested, look surprised, tell them to explain what they mean and thank them for teaching you!
KG Class page
Term 1: Literacy: Phonics is a major component of our literacy program in Kindergarten and is especially important in Term 1 when we will attempt to teach most of the 26 letters of the alphabet along with a few important blends. In doing so we will be teaching the letter name, the common sound (as well as the common exceptions), the capital and lower case, and how to write each. The order we will be covering letters in (at the rate of roughly 2 letters each week) will be:
a, m, s, t, i, f, p, n, o, d, r, g ... You can make a big difference at home by regularly discussing letters. Develop flash cards for each letter of the alphabet that your child can use to recall the name or sound of each letter. Feel free to cover all letters, but be aware that if your child is not strong in this yet, focussing on the ones we have covered and expanding that range slowly will work best. Try playing games like Eye Spy or having scavenger hunts around the house, yard or in a magazine or book looking for items which start with a certain letter or sound. If you make multiple copies of the alphabet cards (included below) you can play memory (maybe not all letters at once, the 52 card grid is a bit big!) or snap (you'll need at least 4 copies for that one). You could mix this up by including lower case and capitals or by making a set of picture cards starting with each letter/sound. In all games, remember to have your child name the letter or say its sound each time a card is exposed. Use this template to print alphabet flash cards (on light cardboard is best). Commercially available sets are great and often include a picture starting with each sound, but you can also create your own easily using clipart and a few basic word processing skills! Alphabet Cards Here (pdf 97 KB) Handwriting is also very important. We are practicing letters and sentences daily and also regularly practice writing our name correctly using NSW Foundation Style (or 'School Writing'!). You should have received a practice page modelling all lower case and capital letters to use at home (or grab it Letter Writing Sheets here (pdf 60 KB)) and can ask your teacher for a copy of a name writing sheet if particular practice is still needed. Reading is another area in which your child will need a lot of support and encouragement and where you cannot practice enough. In our classrooms we are building a bank of common words which we can draw upon for reading. You will also know about the M100W (sight words) that are now being practiced at home. Along with this important tool, we are learning about a number of important 'cues' or strategies which the children need to develop into competent readers. The cues we have taught so far include: 'Owl Eyes' - which teaches us to look at the pictures for clues about what the words will say. Owl Eyes Here (pdf 25 KB) 'Lips The Fish' - which teaches us to look at the first letter and get our lips ready to make that sound. Lips The Fish Here (pdf 29 KB) 'Stretchy Snake' - this is an important one to understand. It is what you probably have heard as 'sounding it out' and is a vital strategy but can be over-stressed and become the only strategy. This is a problem because it doesn't always work (try stretching out the sounds in the words of this sentence: 'I was sure I caught that beautiful leopard'!). Stretchy Snake is great for phonetically spelt words and teaches us to stretch out the sounds like chewing gum (think of it as saying the sounds slowly and holding each sound until you say the next one). This works very well for CVC (consonant - vowel - consonant) words like 'mat' and 'can'. Stretchy Snake Here (pdf 39 KB) Sight words are vital for reading success, and are separate to the phoics and 'sounding out' of new words. The idea with sightwords is that the children learn to instantly recognise the majority of common and difficult to 'sound out' words. Our school uses the tried and trusted M100W system and your child will begin with 12 'Golden Words'. Once your child can demonstrate instant recognition of these words when 'flashed' in a random oderthey will progress through the 'Red Words', 'Blue Words', 'Green Words' etc. in a similar fashion. Again, it is up to you how you practice, but games like those above, placing words as stepping stones or on steps on the way to bed etc and concentrating on less well recalled words rather than the whole pile each time can be useful. Please see your teacher for copies of the appropriate list if needed, or download Golden and Red here: Gold and Red words (pdf 98 KB). PLEASE remember that this is not a race and moving children through the levels before they are ready is very counter productive! Writing at this stage is based on simple sentences based around ourselves and what we have done. Early in the term we are still using a lot of tracing modelled sentences before writing the sentence ourselves. We also talk daily about using capital letters to start a sentence and a full stop to end it. Along with this we obviously need to define a sentence and we usually talk about a sentence being a group of words which makes sense and tells us something.
Numeracy We will be spending a great deal of time early in the term working with numbers 1-20. We ensure the children know the oral counting of numbers, pronunciation (13 = 'th' not 'f' and 'teen' not 'ty' for example!), and recognition of the numerals. This is an area you can also be of great assistance by using flash cards to ensure this knowledge Download Number Cards Here (pdf 125 KB) and through games such as snap and memory again. Also you could try identifying numbers in the environment like on signs by the road, house numbers, page numbers, car number plate numbers or the number on the shirts of their favourite sports stars etc. Depending on where your child is at the '50' or '110' speed signs could be the full number or the digits that make each up, you could talk about the number before and the number after etc. Writing the numbers is also an important skill at this stage. Again, practicing at home is useful, and this practice page could come in handy. Number Writing Practice (pdf 44 KB) Don't forget to have fun with it too - there are so many good counting songs which you'll remember if you put your mind to it ('5 in the bed', '10 green bottles', '5 little ducks', '3 little speckled frogs', 'once I caught a fish alive' etc.) We also work on counting beyond 20, looking for patterns in the hundreds chart (Download Here (pdf 32 KB)), counting forwards as well as backwards etc. The other big component of Term 1 numeracy is simple addition and subtraction. We concentrate on starting with the bigger number and are aiming to get the children to begin from that number and 'count on' rather than having to start at 1 each time (i.e. 6 + 3 = 6 - 7 ,8, 9 ... 9! rather than 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 - 7, 8, 9 ... 9!). In our work with addition and subtraction we regularly manipulate counters and other objects, use our fingers and use number stories ('I had 3 friends at my birthday party and 2 more came late ... etc.). We also use the simple addition and subtraction algorithm (6 + 3 = 9 and 7 - 3 = 4 etc). Additionally we will cover the days of the months, simple 2D shapes, describing position in simple ways, using simple charts and graphs to compare and collect data and work with aspects of volume and capacity. Share on
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