My Prep Report – Water Bugs and Dragonflies

Prep Report May 2009

 Overview:

Developing the concepts & skills needed to be a confident and capable learner is evident in our planning and classrooms. Promoting a ‘love of learning’ underpins all that we do.

Literacy

The Early Years Program is the foundation of our classroom planning. Assessment is driving our teaching and learning with student’s needs being targeted. Strategies such as Guided Reading are being introduced along with shared Big Book reading, Modelled Reading, Round Robin reading and Independent Reading as part of the student’s daily program.

Comprehension – Reading for meaning is our constant driver with children being asked to retell events, ask questions, make statements about texts and respond to what they have read or have had read to them in a variety of ways i.e. creative – performance or visual arts, written etc… Differentiation is evident in our planning documents allowing children to be working in their learning zone.

Writing and developing a passion for writing is part of our daily classroom program. Children are given opportunities to write every day. Sounds are reviewed constantly with our program extending to blends, three letter words, common words and spelling rules to targeted students or as a planned teaching focus. Strategies are taught within the writing session through targeted groups or when responding to individual needs. The Early Years teaching strategies i.e. Shared Writing, Modelled Writing, Guided Writing, Interactive Writing and Independent Writing are developing or being introduced to our Prep students. Developing student’s letter formation (handwriting) is incorporated into our daily program.

Numeracy

 Our planning for this term is comprehensive, targeting initial concepts and understanding needed to extend learning. We are collecting and learning about data, the concept of chance, days of the week, number to 10/20 and beyond, exploring time, introducing addition and subtraction, and ordinal number. Oral counting and automatic response are incorporated into our daily program to develop thinking skills. The Early Years strategies are being introduced in our classroom i.e. planned focus and targeted groups ensuring that individual learning needs are met and children are learning in their zone.

PYP

Our Transdisciplinary Theme in our current inquiry is ‘Where we are in place and time’. Our central idea is ‘documenting personal histories allows us to reflect on and celebrate who we are and where we’ve come from alongside ‘we all have our own personal histories and traditions. The children are very engaged in this inquiry. Thank you to ……….. for coming in and speaking to our Prep students about history. This talk set the scene and the students have been busy discovering about themselves and others. This week the Preps are going on their first excursion to the Immigration Museum. Parent support has once again been wonderful.

In my last post I talked about the wonderful responses my preps wrote about the text Water Bugs and Dragonflies. I have included a number of samples in this post.

Cheers Nina