Junior News
By Felicia Ward | Posted: Thursday March 28, 2019
Thank you to everyone who took the time to come to our Kid’s Conference in Week 7. The children absolutely loved sharing their new skills and becoming the ‘teacher’ for a morning.
Swimming
Our eight days of swimming have now finished and what a fantastic few weeks it has been!
It has been great to see children so excited and keen to participate in swimming lessons and to give new things a 'go'.
Learning to swim and water safety are essential skills to have and we value and appreciate the hard work that the JC Swim School instructors continue to put in. We are always blown away by the improvements we see over the short swimming block.
Usually swimming lessons are held twice a year. Last year because of the increasing price we made the decision to only have one swimming block. We are interested to know if you would support another swimming block towards the end of the year. Please fill out the survey below and let us know what you think:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe7q39y9d-dDwiTmZAB4k4iV9ToacP3C2mHYpFk2cmEh6qPBg/viewform
A big thank you must go to parents and grandparents who have given up the time to help out at swimming. We appreciate your help getting children organised and back on the bus as quickly as possible. It would not be possible without you all!
We are looking forward to resuming normal class routines next week.
Punctuation
A reminder that in the Junior Syndicate this term our big focus in on accelerating writing. At the beginning of this year an independent writing sample was taken from each student. From this we have identified punctuation as a target area across all classes.
At the end of 2 years at school it is expected that students will use capital letters correctly to begin sentences and for proper nouns. They should also be competent in using full stops, question marks and exclamation marks to end a sentence. After 2 years we would also expect children to be experimenting with other punctuation such as speech marks and commas.
So how can you help?
- Look at different types of punctuation with your child in their reading book. Discuss why the author has chosen to use it.
- Ask your child to use a highlighter pen to highlight different forms of punctuation in old newspapers/magazines.
- Ask your child to give you a sentence using a particular type of punctuation.
- Notice different punctuation on signs when you are out driving in the car.
- Talk to your child about the different punctuation and use these when saying sentences aloud or when creating silly sentences.
See the punctuation checklist below.
Most importantly give your child lots of opportunities to write! Make it fun and engaging. Try ideas such as making a card, writing a weekend wish list, making a shopping list, sending an email or keeping a diary.
Alternatively here is some online punctuation games:
http://www.funenglishgames.com/grammargames/punctuation.html
https://www.roythezebra.com/reading-games.html
Many thanks,
Junior Teachers
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