Primary Classroom News

Prep A

Much of the learning that happens in a prep class is related to speaking, listening and growing our knowledge of different words. Children’s ability to describe their world and understand it is heavily reliant on their knowledge of words. Speaking to your child, reading to them, asking them questions and providing them with opportunities to experience the world are ways of expanding their vocabularies. By 5-7 years, children should have an expressive vocabulary of 3000-5000 words.

In class we begin our day with simple conversational skills. These skills involve taking turns when speaking, speaking in sentences and using words to describe our feelings and experiences. At home make sure that your child becomes familiar with the idea of taking turns when speaking and is able to reply to questions using sentences rather than shrugging or giving one word answers. Ask your child how they are feeling; if they answer with ‘Good’ ask them if they can think of a more interesting word to describe how they are feeling.

Make uninterrupted time for conversations. Children love to have someone listen to what they have to say. Some conversations starters could be:

1. If you could go into any TV show – what show would want to visit?
2. If you could only eat one fruit forever – what fruit would it be?
3. What are three words you would uses to describe yourself?
4. What do you think you are good at?
5. If you went to another planet – what would you bring with you?
6. If you were a teacher what rules would you make?
7. If you could make your whole house out of food – what food would you use?
8. If you could have one super power what would it be?
9. If you could be an animal what would you be?
10. If you could paint the whole world – what color would you use?

Make sure that you have a look though the photographs of things we have been doing in our classroom. These have included exploring the properties of lines and shapes with fences; a shape is a line that has joined and closed. Farmers would have terrible problems if their paddocks had fences that were in lines and did not make shapes. Making patterns with pattern blocks and sharing our Show and Tell in groups. Of course there was also the fun of Pyjama Day!