During InitiaLit sessions we have challenged ourselves to spell new words and sentences without using sound boxes to help us. We have learnt the new sounds ee, zz, z and ch. Every week we also learn a bank of new ‘tricky words’. These are often ‘tricky’ to read because the sounds in them are not predictable and they may not follow the rules that most words follow. So it is important for us to learn these words by sight. It would be very useful to practice saying, reading and recognising these words at home, so they ‘stick’ in our memory. These are some of the tricky words you might like to practice: this, that, they, there, was, no, like, said, here, and were.

Our Tricky Word Tree:

We have been studying the mentor text Superworm written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. We learnt that fiction texts are fake (made up) and that non-fiction texts are real. The Preps got to watch the animated short film version of the story and discuss comparisons between the two versions, naming things that were the same, and different. We then read a non-fiction text about worms and learnt lots of facts. We then turned these into books, becoming Authors ourselves. We can’t wait to share these with you during Book Week. We also made worms that really wiggle. It was lots of fun. Here is a sneak peek of some of Worm books:

Maths has been all about addition and subtraction. We have learnt lots of number bonds and we can all write number sentences to show us adding together, or taking away. We have learnt new maths vocabulary like inverse (addition and subtraction sums can be reversed, eg 8 + 3 = 11 or 11 – 3 = 8) and commutativity (a math rule that means you can change the order of numbers in an addition problem and the answer will stay the same eg, 8 + 3 = 11 or 3 + 8 = 11). Check out some of our calculations below:

How exciting that we are about to have our next round of 3 Way Interviews on Monday next week! It doesn’t seem that long ago when all of the preps gave me their very first wish for their learning. Many wrote that their wish was to learn how to read. Now, they ALL can. What an amazing achievement. The Prep’s have been working hard on their Interview sheet to share with you, they cannot wait to celebrate their learning!