Head of Preparatory School

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PREP SCHOOL UPCOMING EVENTS

Welcome to Term 2

A warm welcome back to all our families and a big welcome to our new families.

Ben Barter – K Red
Jack Stanmore – K White
Luca Krile – 2 Yellow
Joanna O’Keefe – 2 White
Marcus Jovevski – 2 Yellow

Connection with our Older Community

In Term 1 the charity nominated by the Yr 2 students for the K-2 Prep students was to provide creative items eg. bookmarks, letters, poems, origami to the residents of the Bougainvillea Retirement Village located in Neutral Bay. The students did an amazing job in providing such wonderful and carefully written material. The residents really enjoyed selecting their bookmark and origami and reading the variety of letters. This term we will continue to work on items for this centre but this time focusing on the particular text types being taught in class to make books for the Bougainvillea community. Thank you to the families who assisted their child in completing any of the Home Learning tasks around this charity initiative, it was very much appreciated.

Cross-generational connections are an important and exciting connection to make. I am so thrilled at the level of enthusiasm as well as kindness that our Prep learners shared last term.

From the Lucy Hill Library

We are excited to welcome families back into the Lucy Hill Library to select books for your children. The opening hours for parent borrowing are:

Mornings: Monday – Friday: 8.00 – 8.20am

Afternoons: Monday – Thursday: 3.00 – 3.30pm

Our Librarian, Mrs Victoria Roberts outlines below what the vision for our Prep Library is this term, as well as outlining our Parent Resource books. Happy reading!

Premier’s Reading Challenge

There is still time for your child/ren to participate in this year’s Premier’s Reading Challenge. They have until August to read 30 books. If they read a book a night, they will be finished in a month! Your child does not have to do the reading for themselves, you can read to them or share the reading.

Each child has a sticker in the back of their Student Planner that tells you their User Name and Password so that you can enter the reading record online at the PRC website. When you open the PRC page click on Logon in the left hand box and you will see where to enter these. This will take you to your child’s Student Reading Record. When you have added 30 titles it will say Congratulations and you will not be able to enter anymore.

There are hundreds of books labelled for this challenge. There are stories, information books, biographies, toon books, so you should be able to find books that satisfy both your child’s and your own reading tastes.

Recreational Reading

Library borrowing is all about recreational reading and students self-selecting material of interest to them. It is important that they can choose books for themselves and that is why we say to parents let your child choose some of the books and you choose some too. In this way you see what they are interested in and like, but you also get to broaden your child’s choices with the books you choose. We want your children to develop a love of reading and to find joy, comfort and laughter in the pages of books. We also like to encourage wide reading, because as with food, a varied book diet is the best. Not every book you take home will be a huge success. It is good to see what doesn’t work and to take risks with choices. Students need to know that it is okay to bring a book back and get something different. They also need to borrow things that they cannot read independently and know that you will read it with them. Peers may have read it or been talking about it and they want to see what it is about. The more you read aloud ‘great books’ (such as fairy tales, myths, biographies, realistic fiction, poetry, etc) the more they will crave returning to those enriching books that you share together. These books will mean your child’s vocabulary will grow and their knowledge of book language or story grammar will be extended.

Children’s author, Anna Dewdney spoke at the Fostering Lifelong Learners Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she said:

“…when you read with a child, you are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. You are doing a much more powerful thing, and it is something that we are losing, as a culture. By reading with a child, you are teaching that child to be human. When you open a book, and share your voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes. I will go further and say that that child learns to feel the world more deeply, and the child becomes more aware of himself and others in a way that he simply cannot experience except in your lap, or in your classroom, or in your reading circle.

When we read books with children, we share other worlds, yes, but more importantly, we share ourselves. Reading with children makes an intimate, human connection that teaches that child what it means to be alive as one of many live beings on the planet. We are teaching empathy. We are naming feelings, expressing experience, and demonstrating love and understanding…all in a safe environment. When we read a book with children, then children – no matter how stressed, no matter how challenged – are drawn out of themselves to bond with other human beings, and to see and feel the experiences of others. I believe it is that moment that makes us human. In this sense, reading makes us human.”

She doesn’t say that it is an easy job, but that it is extremely worthwhile and that it will set our children on the path to becoming confident, empathic human beings.

Multi-Cultural Reading

As part of the curriculum we include multi-cultural perspectives. Our very well-stocked Library has a myriad of books to support the Aboriginal and Asian perspectives of the NSW Curriculum, as well as those of other countries and cultures. 

This term the Library is going on safari in Africa. On display, you will find books about the people and animals that live there. There are stories about children such as Handa and Jamela, stories about animals such as the wonderful tales by Mwenye Hadithi and the Tinga Tinga Tales, there are folktales explaining why animals behave in certain ways eg. Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears and How the Leopard Got His Claws. There are biographies on famous Nobel Prize winning, African people such as Nelson Mandela and Wangari Maathai, as well as enterprising children such as 14 year old William Kamkwamba who harnessed the wind to make power for his village and Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah who cycled hundreds of kilometres across Ghana with only one strong leg.

So this term, we are encouraging students to read a book about a character who does not look like them or live like them and read a book about a place that you they don’t know much about.

Parent Reference Section

There is a specific Parent Reference section of the Library which may be of interest. You are very welcome to borrow these books, dip in, take what you want at this point in time and come back later and revisit it if you need to.

You could try:

Mrs Ainslie Breckenridge
Head of Preparatory School
abreckenridge@redlands.nsw.edu.au
9968 9848