Dear Parents,

 Hello and welcome back. We hope everyone had a relaxing and enjoyable holiday. From what the children have told us it appears as though everyone was very busy!

 Miss Ashley Gillies and Mr Angelo Ingriselli, prac students from Wollongong University, have started working with Kindergarten this week. They will be working with us for the next three weeks. We are looking forward to having their assistance in the classroom.

 December 2^nd Kindergarten will be performing at the Assembly. This will be our final assembly for the year.

 Below is an outline of some of the content that Kindergarten will learn this term.

 Integrated Unit #1 – Weeks 1-4

(HSIE, Art, Science, PD/H/PE)

The first unit we will be completing is titled “Plants”. During this unit the children will become ‘Scientists’ to observe and explore seeds and plants. Through various exciting experiments we will plant seeds and shrubs in order to discover where plants come from and what plants need to grow and change. We began this unit today and the children are quite excited about it!

Integrated Unit #2 – Weeks 5-9

(HSIE, Art, Science, PD/H/PE)

The second unit we hope to complete is titled “Celebrations”. During this unit the children will learn about numerous celebrations from a variety of cultures. If you have any information/music/food on cultural celebrations that you would like to share, please let us know!

 Literacy:

• Continue writing recounts, information reports and procedure texts. We will also begin writing observations on the changes we see with the plants we grow.
• Continue to work on writing three letter and practise hearing blends in four letter words.
• Continue to write in our handwriting books and writing using lines.
• Continue learning new sight words. The practise that occurs at home is greatly beneficial to your child’s automatic recall. Please continue to encourage your child to change their Home Readers each week as some students are repeatedly forgetting to bring them in.
• Parent reading groups as usual. It will commence next week at 9.00am and will operate Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.

Maths:

• Learn to tell time on the hour using both analog and digital clocks.
• Learn to interpret picture graphs.
• Complete more formal take away and addition problems.
• Learn to calculate money.
• Learn about quarters and how to create groups of different sizes (multiplication). 

News:

Week 1 - Holiday talk

Week 2 – Favourite plant/vegetable.

Week 3 – My garden. Describe it and maybe even bring a few cuttings into class.

Week 4 - Plant Ideas or suggestions for the School Playground

Week 5 - Favourite home reader

Week 6 - Our family cultural celebrations. This could include any family traditions you may have.

Week 7 -  Birthdays: what does your family do to celebrate birthdays?

Week 8 -  Favourite home reader

Week 9 - Best thing about Kindergarten, it could be a memory, a story anything!

Week 10 - What I want for Christmas. What would you like Santa Claus to bring you!

Welcome back and please remember our door is always open. Also, a very special thank you to the children who attended Mrs Ruscica’s wedding and another special thank you to all the children who contributed the David Jones gift voucher. It was a very kind gesture!

Crista and Christine J