Term 1-Prep Newsletter
Welcome!
Welcome to all our Prep families! We hope you have
all had a wonderful break with your Prep child and
that you and your child are ready for a fun and exciting year.
We are starting the year looking at families and
the school. This unit involves building a sense of
belonging, understanding classroom values, building
positive behaviours, making connections between
home and school, family structures and understanding that everybody is unique and can contribute in different ways.
We will also be looking at healthy eating and what
keeps us healthy. This will coincide with our visit to
the Life Education van to meet healthy Harold.
We are very proud of the way the students are settling into their
class and how they are working beautifully together. It is very
pleasing to be part of. We look forward to a great year together.
Please visit our school website and read our Prep blog. We love to
write small articles and include photos so you can see what your
children are doing at school. http://mtwavnth.vic.edu.au/prep-
Special Dates
Students do not attend on
these days unless it is their
testing day:
-Wednesday 11th February
- Wednesday 18th February
- Wednesday 25th February

Full weeks of school begin
the week starting Monday
2nd of March

3rd March
Life Education Van visit

12th March TBC
Whole School Cultural Day

21st March
Autumn Fest

23rd March
Parent Teacher Interviews

27th March
Last day of Term 1
Brain food
Students eat ‘Brain food’ at 10am every day. ‘Brain food’ consists of fruit or vegetables, but
no processed foods. The reason we encourage the use of ‘Brain food’ is because the brain
requires two times the amount of energy to function efficiently during the day. Fruit and
vegetables are an excellent source of fuel for the brain, instead of releasing short bursts
of energy like processed food, fruit and vegetables have carbohydrates that the body
breaks down gradually, releasing glucose to fuel the brain over time.
Cheese, biscuits and processed foods do not release the right type of
sugars to assist the brain to function effectively and therefore are
not acceptable forms of Brain food.
Mathematics
Over the Term, students will be participating in a variety of activities such as hands on,
iPad, open-ended and authentic learning situations that allow them to learn and develop
their Maths skills.
They will be learning Numbers 1-10 and how to write them, recognize them and make
models using these numbers. They will be sorting, describing and naming 2D shapes and
familiar 3D shapes.
Students will have a focus on learning the days of the week and making and recognizing
patterns.
Literacy
Literacy skills are exciting developments in your child’s life.
Over the Term they will be learning to hold a pencil correctly, recognize
letters/sounds, write letters and begin to formulate written words.
Students will begin to learn how to read by looking at the sounds of letters and sounding out words, looking for words they can recognize from
sight and use illustrations to find the meaning of unfamiliar words.
They will look at the letters S, T, M, A, C, P and E .
Remember to practise
reading every night!
Students will be learning the following High Frequency Words: I, Can, My,
Was, To, And, The, Am, A, At, Like, Have, In, Is, It, Be, Of and That.
Reminders

The school nurse will be visiting in Term 1. Please fill in the form that was sent home in
the white envelope on Thursday 5th February and return it to school ASAP.

From September through to the end of April, all students must wear a Sunsmart hat
when they are outside.

Please label all brain food containers, lunch boxes, play lunch containers, drink bottles, hats and jumpers.

Please ensure the Take Home Folder (the green folder with the school logo and clear
window) is sent to school every day, as it contains your child’s communication diary, important notes and their Take Home readers.

If your child has a contagious illness or is unwell, please ensure they are kept at home
to recuperate. When they are well enough to attend school again please send in a note,
an email or phone the school to advise the school of their absence.

Please bring in a labelled library bag and art smock.

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Term 1-Prep Newsletter
‘Share time’
In Term 1, students will benefit from participating in weekly ‘Share Time’.
‘Share Time’ days are on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. A reminder that the green
Department of Education bags are a great way to separate their special items from the
other contents of their school bag.
The ’Share Time’ schedule is listed below. We have tried to incorporate what they are
learning at school in their schedule to assist the students with practising their letters,
sounds and recalling information taught at school.
Date
Topic
Week beginning 16th February
Share something that begins with the
letter ‘T’.
Week beginning 23rd February
Share something that begins with the
letter ‘M’.
Week beginning 2nd March
Share a picture of themselves and tell
us about themselves.
Week beginning 9th March
Share something starting with the letter ‘C’ or ‘A’.
Week beginning 16th March
Share something starting with the letter ‘P’ .
Week beginning 23rd March
Share something starting with the letter ‘E’.
Term 1– Prep Newsletter
Page 3
Take Home Readers
Students will begin to take home reading books starting from the 3rd
week of Term.
Students need to practise reading every night at home, this only has to
be for 15 minutes. For the first few books it may be someone reading to
the child and build up to your child recognizing familiar letters or High
Frequency Words that have been learnt in class.
When reading with your child, encourage them to point to the words as
they read, discuss the pictures with you and try to work out unfamiliar
words by sounding them out, looking at the initial sound and using picture cues to assist
them. Try and have a conversation with your child about what they have read and make
predictions about the story before they read.
Timetable
This year Preps will be participating in German, The Arts and PE sessions.
Library will be run from the classroom. Borrowing will start in Week 4.
Monday: PE (1 hour session)
Wednesday: German (1 hour session)
Friday: The Arts ( 1 hour session) and Library
German– Herr Helmich
Willkommen!
Welcome to German at our school. My name is Herr Helmich and I am looking forward to doing lots of fun activities with Preps this year.
This term will focus on exchanging greetings and learning the colours and numbers in German.
We will be doing a lot of singing, dancing and looking at the body parts which help us move.
We will also be finding out about similarities and differences between the German and Australian culture, finishing off the term by making some special Easter craft.
Lessons will comprise mainly of speaking and listening activities, song and dance, ICT, as well
as art.
Please visit the German page of our school website to find some links to German activities
for use at home.
I look forward to working with your children to help them learn and enjoy the German language and culture!
Tschüss und Auf Wiedersehen!
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Term 1-Prep Newsletter
Physical Education– Michael Hogg
The majority of Term 1 at Prep level will see students becoming familiar with the surroundings that they are in, whether that be inside or outside.
Body movement and fundamental motor skills will be an important facet, as students work in
different activities. Students will be required to respond to different stimuli, such as music, a whistle, or particular sounds and/or movements as well as being comfortable in a controlled environment.
The Arts– Lindsey Bates
This term the Prep students will be undertaking a Visual Arts Inquiry into a range of different artistic mediums. During art classes the students will work in small groups to explore the use of chalk, crayons, paint and craft materials. Sessions will focus on helping
students to develop skills and techniques in these mediums. During these sessions the
students will also be given opportunities to develop their language skills while making observations about and responding to art works. They will then apply these practiced skills
to develop artworks that reflect their ideas, thoughts and feelings.
Building fine motor skills- outline and fill
with crayon and chalk pastels
Creating contrast – night scenes with
black paper and white chalk
Exploring medium- mutli-step mediumrubber stamps and water-colour paints
Exploring shape – creative forms with
coloured paper and glue
Term 1– Prep Newsletter
Page 5
MIOOW Words
At the beginning of Term 1, your child will take home their Golden and Red MIOOW
words.
MIOOW words are designed to improve children’s recognition and processing of important
words in reading and writing. Increasing the exposure to these words promotes easy recall
and storage in long-term memory and working memory.
There are 100 words in the MIOOW word system, broken down into 7 colours, increasing
in difficulty as the children learn them. They begin with Golden and Red words, moving on
to Blue, Green, Orange, Indigo and Violet.
Students will be tested regularly on these words so that you can be sent home an up to
date list of the words they know how to read and recognise instantly.
Some students will learn a new word by looking at it a couple of times and other children
will need to see a word multiple times before they can say it, read it and write it competently.
To assist your child, please help them practise their MIOOW words at home. This can be
done through reading them off the page, cutting them out and playing snap, memory or
bingo, showing a word and asking your child to say it in a sentence or simply seeing if they
can pick one word to find in a Take Home Reader at night.
To learn something and practise something does not mean you need to spend copious
amounts of time on it each night, a quick 5 minutes is sometimes all you will need to do!
Communication Diary
As your child is given their green Take Home Folder, they will have their Communication Diary placed in there as well.
The Communication Diary is used to record the title of your child’s Take Home Reader each
night, notes to and from school and can also be used for absence notes.
Teachers will use it to write/stick reminders for you or sometimes your child may write
something in there too!
We will look at the diaries each day to ensure we do not miss any correspondence from home
and are requesting that you check the diary daily. We will sign any entry made in there to let
you know that it has been seen.
Please ensure it stays in your child’s folder and is brought to school each day.
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Term 1-Prep Newsletter
Parent Helpers
We would love parents to come into the Prep Learning Area and work with us
and the students of Prep K and Prep M.
Helping in the classroom can involve reading with students, helping in Reading
Groups, working with small groups of students completing an activity or working with individual students with a particular focus. We may also invite parents to help with incursions and excursions!
A notice will go home during the Term asking if anyone can volunteer their
time in the classroom. We hope you understand that siblings cannot accompany you into the Learning Space during this time as we find this can often be
too distracting for the prep students.
Pencil Grip
Establishing correct pencil
grip is very important in the
early years. Children need to
have regular practise and
we need to ensure they are
being corrected when they
are holding a pencil incorrectly. A child may revert
back to their old grip when
you are not there to watch.
That’s fine, as long as you
continue to practise with
them, reinforcing the correct way to hold a pencil
which establishes the new,
correct habit in their mind.
Victorian Modern Cursive
In Prep we learn handwriting using Victorian Modern Cursive.