Late last term, students were given individual logins for Mathletics and we have received great feedback on the program. We are encouraging all families to regularly use Mathletics as it assists with engaging students with maths and increasing their motivation to learn. Mathletics is adaptive which means that it responds to the individual student’s strengths and weaknesses and students instantly know if they are on the right track and can work through the curriculum at their own pace.
Live Mathletics is another exciting element of the program, where students can compete against others from around the world. Lastly, the results flow seamlessly between home and school so you can stay informed of your child’s progress.
If you are unable to locate your child's log in, it should be stapled into the back of their home reader log. However, it is no longer attached, please feel free to ask one of the teachers to print off another copy.
Below is a video for parents about the benefit of using Mathletics:
In Term 2, the Preps have been learning about families. Our integrated topic (Me and My Family) assists with the transition
from home and kinder to school through making links between these areas and by getting to know students and parents. The Preps will develop their early skills by talking to groups of children, talking, writing and drawing about personal
experiences and using simple thinking tools, such as mind maps and T-charts.
This week, the Preps will be making class world maps, which will require them to know where their families originated from. We ask that parents and caregivers discuss this with the students, as it will assist the students with connecting to this topic and will provide a rich opportunity to develop their vocabulary in this area.
We look forward to sharing our family world maps with you,
Over the last few weeks, the Preps have been learning how to count, collect and write their numbers to 10. Below, you will find some pictures of the activities we did. These include making numbers out of play dough, writing numbers in sand, collecting objects and matching them to numbers (just to name a few).
On Friday afternoon, the Preps went on a Shape Walk around our school grounds. We all looked for the same shapes—circles, triangles, rectangles, squares or another kind of shape, and we kept track of how many shapes we found by taking pictures.
On our Shape Walk, we practiced:
• matching, naming and describing basic shapes
• learning about the characteristics of the basic shapes
• gathering information from the environment
• using positional words such as over, under, near, next to, etc
This is a great activity to try at home, as it will help your child to become more familiar with shapes and their features.
Last Friday, we celebrated the Preps 100 days of school by centring the day around activities that focused on the number 100. Below is a quick recap of what we got up to...
On Thursday, we started making our 100 cake and the Preps measured out all of the ingredients, ensuring that they were all mixed correctly and then put them into the oven to cook.
Developmental Play
Developmental Play was centred around the number 100 and challenges.
Challenge 1: Build a structure from 100 cups
Preps build a pyramid, a jail and a castle.
Here is an interview with two of the Preps who will walk you through their jail:
Challenge 2: Collect 100 smiles
A group of students went around the room collecting smiles. Pairs collected ten smiles each and added these to our graph. In the end we had collected 100 beautiful smiles and could easily skip count these by 10's.
Challenge 3 : Build a structure from 100 pieces of Lego/blocks
A group of students used 100 Legos and large blocks to create structures. Some of these included a castle, a space ship and a city.
Challenge 4: Icing our cake
Students carefully mixed the icing and applied it to the cake ready for the 100 party
Our 100's collection
Students were encouraged to bring in 100 of something for our display. Below are some of the interesting items that we had in our collection.
100 Cheerios
100 Marbles
100 Footy Cards
100 puzzle pieces
Our 100 Goggles!
During Developmental Play, students created their own 100 goggles which could allow them to see 100 years into the future.
Maths
Students moved around to three different maths activities which focused on the number 100. One involved counting 100 fingers and to do this the students practiced skip counting by 5's in order to figure out how many hand prints we needed. These displays have been used throughout the week for other maths activities.
100 Fingers
Some questions from the Preps:
"How many hands do we need if we want 10 fingers?
"How many hands do we need if we want 50 fingers?"
"How many hands do we need if we want 100 fingers?"
Our 100 Party
At 3pm families were invited to attend our 100 Party, which involved watching a slideshow of pictures of the last 100 days, listening to the preps sing a song, eating our delicious cake and spending some time together in our courtyard.
It's hard to believe that 100 days have already flown by, time flies when you're having fun!
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