East Hamersley Campus PPA
Term 2 for PPA has been another exciting and hardworking term. The children should be so proud of all their learning and their achievements so far!
We started the term again with our Literature Based Unit, this term our story focus was ‘The Three Little Pigs’. A Literature Based Unit is a way of systematically unpacking stories and linking this to carefully selected activities that target specific language skills to assist our students to understand the language in books. The children enjoyed creating the Three Little Pig’s houses and their own puppets, costumes and other story telling props. The children built farms in the block area with the farm animals and role-played daily farm life with a ‘small world’ farm.
The children have also been continuing to develop their comprehension skills. Last term we learnt about Whole Body Listening and ‘Clunking’ when there is a problem. We might ‘clunk’ when we don’t understand something or even something as simple as we can’t find our water bottle. ‘Clunking’ helps the teacher or our friends know that there is a problem, and we need help! The Pre-primary students are so enthusiastic when it comes to helping their friends when there is a ‘clunk!’.
This term the children have started learning about verbalising and visualising. Sometimes when someone says something to us, we don’t know what they are talking about. So, we have been working on using our describing words to help put a better picture in someone’s brain when we are telling them about something. We also need to work on visualising in our own brain when someone is talking to us. This helps us to comprehend and understand things when someone is talking to us, when we are reading and it helps us to follow instructions.
We had the wonderful Mrs Vawser come to visit us to help us learn about Verbalising and Visualising. These photos show us verbalising to a friend what is happing in the picture card and our friend visualising what they are hearing by drawing a picture of it. How clever we are!
Miss Kate Brennan, Mrs Pauline Acott, Miss Elin Wee and the PPA Koolangka (children)
Classroom Teachers and Speech Pathologist
East Hamersley Campus PPB
Pre -primary in Term 2 has been exciting, we have been learning to visualise. Each morning we use visualising to listen to clues, make connections and draw a picture. We then verbalise what we have drawn. For example, we are learning about places where we go as part of Geography. (My place and my favourite place)
Mrs Nash gives us four clues, for example I am thinking of a place where we go,
- It has lots of green grass.
- It has lots of trees.
- There is a slide and trees.
- People like to walk their dog.
What is the place I am thinking of? Students then have a smart guess through making connections and then we close our eyes to visualise. We repeat the clues and then draw a picture from our picture in our brain. The students love to verbalise what they see in their brain and then use drawing to express their picture.
Narrative
The students have been learning all story elements in the story ‘The Three little Pigs’. The children used actions and role play to retell the story. We created our very own story map and we enjoyed telling our stories to our friends and Mrs Silverlock.
Social Skills
As part of our Social skills program, I Do IT! we are learning to greet new friends. We are visiting our other Pre- primary friends and are playing by joining in and trying new play opportunities. As part of our play skills, we have been dressing up and using pronouns to orally state what our friends are wearing.
For example:
She is wearing a pink skirt.
He is wearing a green spotted hat.
Synthetic phonics
We have made progress with our spelling, reading, and writing skills using Sounds Write, a synthetic phonics program that is evidence based and a tool used centre wide.
Mrs Nash, Miss Bates, Miss Wee, Mrs Carbonne, Mrs Backx
Pre-primary East Hamersley team – Class Teachers, Speech Pathologist and Education Assistant.
Padbury Campus – PPA
We have been learning the story of the three little pigs. To develop our semantic knowledge, we learned about farm animals and their produce.
We played in the new Farmer’s Market Joint Action Routine to role play with money. All the items were $1 or $2 – we had to look closely to recognise the numbers and use the correct amount for all our shopping. We sorted our food and drinks into categories of fruit, vegetables, meat, bread, milk, honey, eggs, and dairy. Then we linked them to other shops in our community e.g., the butcher, bakery, greengrocer, and fish monger. It was lots of fun playing in the Farmer’s Market.
We also had Farmer Mick and his animals visit our school. 
We got to meet real farm animals. We enjoyed holding them, feeding some and learning about animals that live on a farm.
In Geography, we are learning about where we live. We made a paper plate craft to show ourselves, homes, neighbourhoods, state, country, and world. Our home-corner has transformed into a train station so we can role play catching a train to school, library, the shops, or the city. We are getting lots of practise with using Australian money with $1 and $2 coins as well as $5 and $10 notes. It’s been great!
Miss Nguyen, Mrs Giltrow, Mrs Stopher and Mrs Hopper.
Class Teachers, Speech Pathologist and Education Assistant
Padbury Campus – PPB
‘A Farmyard on Wheels’ came to school for all the Padbury Pre-primary students. Farmer Mick brought his sheep dog, a pig, a pony, an alpaca, chickens, ducks, and geese. The best part was when we each held a baby chick very gently in our hands. We were so excited and had a great time. When we went back to class, we composed a story about ‘A Farmyard on Wheels’ and painted and talked about our favourite animal of the day.
Mrs Rogers
Class Teacher
Poseidon Campus – PPA
Term 2 has been another busy term so far. PPA loved doing our literacy-based unit on the story ‘The Three Little Pigs’. The children had a great time learning about the story and developing their skills at retelling a narrative. We have covered a lot of our letters and sounds, and students are using this knowledge to write words with support by listening to the sounds they hear in words. PPA are doing a fabulous job of being able to identify the first sounds they hear in words.
In numeracy we have been consolidating our counting skills and copying and continuing patterns. We have also been focusing on before and after numbers and addition and subtraction.
Finally, this term in Geography we have been discussing our special places – why they are special to us. The children gave a small presentation to the class telling us about their favourite place and what they do to look after it.
Mrs McDonell
Class Teacher
Poseidon Campus – PPB
This term has been busy and challenging in many ways. For the first time this term, I hope to have a full class again this week after illness has kept many of us away from school. However, we are still having lots of fun and doing so much learning!
Our narrative focus for this term has been ‘The Three Little Pigs’. Apart from learning how to become great story tellers by including all the parts of a story, this unit has allowed us to explore farms and farm animals, label the parts of a pig, engage in role play incorporating a Veterinary Clinic, write about our favourite part of the story and so much more. Our last fabulous lesson about the Three Little pigs, included an innovation of the story – the students all chose new characters for the three pigs and big, bad wolf and it was wonderful listening to the new story creations!
We continue to learn about places as part of our Geography unit this term and each student in the class did a short presentation and painting about their ‘special place’.
We have been learning to add and subtract, order numbers correctly, create our own patterns and work with shapes in maths. The children love this hands-on learning and are doing a great job in acquiring new skills in this learning area.
Last Wednesday, Poseidon Primary held a ‘Crazy dress day’ fundraiser. Crazy clothes, crazy socks and crazy hair were all around us – have a look at the ‘crazy PPB students’!
We look forward to the remainder of term two.
Mrs Foster
Class Teacher
Quinns Beach Campus – PPA & PPB
Students at Quinns Beach have been engaging with the text: ‘The Three Little Pigs’. We have been learning about the meaning of the word strong by investigating different ways of making houses including from biscuits and icing.
We also enjoyed a visit from the Swan Valley Cuddly Animal Farm.
Pre-primary Staff
Quinns Beach.