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Abbotsford Public School

Abbotsford Public School

An innovative and inclusive learning space

Telephone02 9713 6220

Emailabbotsford-p.school@det.nsw.edu.au

KM - Badiwa

Mrs S McKay

SEMESTER 2 2021

Wow! This year is flying by, and we are well into our last term of Kindergarten.

We began the year with 21 enthusiastic students and we enjoyed getting to know each other and settling into the routines of big school life. In Semester One we learnt our single sounds, and how to form and write letters. Before we knew it we were blending sounds to read words and segmenting words to spell words. We played lots of games like ‘Trash and Treasure’ and ‘Bingo’ to help us build up our knowledge of common words. We did lots of shared reading. Smarty Pants was one of our favourites and our display helped us learn to recognise our names. We started writing sentences. We used a capital letter to start a sentence, a full stop at the end of a sentence and spaces in between words.

In mathematics, we learnt how to count, recognise numbers up to 20 and sort objects. Using concrete materials, we learnt the basic concepts of more and less, ordinal numbers, basic addition and subtraction, creating patterns, 2D shapes and measuring length.

There were many highlights for KM. Every week we loved meeting our buddy teacher Ms Walsh and class 5/6W. We did lots of enjoyable activities like craft, dancing, singing, sport and reading. Our buddies are our special friends who help us whenever we need some support. The Hat Parade at Easter time was a great opportunity for us to design and create a hat and participate in a happy whole school activity. We loved participating in a drama incursion in which we retold the Dreamtime story Tiddilick the Frog. We dressed up as different Australian animals and used music and props to create the setting to act out the story. Another special day for us was our walk to Halliday Park for Reconciliation Week to show our respect for the Wangal People who are the First Nations People who own the land on which we live, play and learn here at Abbotsford. We made headpieces using the symbols on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags to decorate our school hats. In history, we learnt about each other’s families. We made family trees that showed how the people in our family are related. We looked at our family backgrounds and found that our ancestors came from many different lands: Italy, China, England, Lebanon, Ireland, Sweden, Hungary, India, Greece and South Africa. News has been a highlight for KM and we loved sharing family artefacts and personal stories with each other. For some KM students the highlight of the week was developing our fundamental movement skills: running, skipping, throwing, catching, and kicking and applying these skills in games.

Semester Two saw many changes as we moved to a highly successful home learning program and for some students of essential workers a special class at school. Each day the students of KM motivated each other as we submitted interesting and creative work samples. We continued to improve our knowledge of sounds and words through participation in the Smart Spelling Program. Each week we had a focus sound, word and sentence and at the end of the week, we challenged ourselves to a dictation test. We focused on learning about Australian animals in science and learnt to write information reports and draw labelled pictures of animals to support the text.  In maths we continued mathematical investigations through playing with numbers, making our own tools like an abacus, 'rekenrek' and pan balance and applying our knowledge of mathematical concepts to everyday problems using materials that were in our own home. We learnt to multiply and divide by sharing objects between our toys making sure they all got a fair share. We participated in yoga activities, became lego masters, enjoyed bird watching, completed jigsaws, planted seeds, helped our families, focused on ways to care for Wangal Land and discovered new ways to recycle, spent time with our pets and watched the stars.

In our final term of Kindergarten, we look forward to socialising with our friends and continuing to develop our basic literacy and numeracy skills to prepare us for our next chapter in life at school. There are many exciting topics which we look forward to studying such as the paintings of Van Gogh, learning how toys move, and of course, there is Christmas!

Mrs McKay and the KM Students