Preparatory Yearly Overview

The Preparatory team is committed on providing an engaging and stimulating environment that nurtures and promotes the physical, social, emotional and learning development of your child. We have a strong focus on the progress of essential English and Mathematics skills allowing students to grow in knowledge, understanding and confidence through authentic learning opportunities.

ENGLISH

Reading: Our focus is upon building and developing skills that enable students to decode texts with increasing accuracy and fluency, focusing on their comprehension. Through modelled, shared and independent reading sessions, students continue to enjoy and develop the building blocks for successful readers. Students are taught reading strategies, phonemic awareness, high frequency words, punctuation, editing skills and comprehension, targeting their individual reading abilities.

Writing: Students have daily writing opportunities. Through modelled, shared and independent writing sessions, teachers’ tune students into thinking about the beginning sounds of words, “stretching out” the sounds, spelling patterns, punctuation and including interesting vocabulary. As students’ confidence grows, they will begin writing simple sentences and be exposed to a number of text types such as narratives, recounts, poetry, information reports and procedures.

Handwriting: Our Preparatory program has a strong focus on teaching the correct pencil grip, sitting position and developing correct letter formation through weekly handwriting sessions.

Phonemic Awareness: At Chatham, we develop phonemic awareness through the use of Cued Articulation. This strategy involves a set of hand cues for teaching the individual sounds. It gives students greater awareness of how and where sounds are produced in the mouth with corresponding hand movements. This program establishes the foundation skills of good phonological awareness and facilitates literacy development in the early school years. 

Speaking and Listening: Students share their learning journey during Investigations and respond to texts where they express their likes, dislikes and feelings. Students engage in regular Circle Time sessions.

MATHEMATICS

Mathematical skills and knowledge is explicitly taught with differentiated activities to further cater for individual needs. Students learn number value and show that numbers can be represented in multiple ways. As students grow in confidence, we explore number patterns, addition and subtraction strategies and division. We explore weight, length and the capacity of objects by estimating and comparing. Preparatory students identify and describe 2D and 3D shapes.

INVESTIGATIONS

The Investigations Program is a play-based approach to learning, which stimulates student’s development and encourages students to explore, create and investigate tasks together. This program supports and reinforces the content learnt in the structured learning times. Embedded within is the development of not only Literacy and Numeracy skills, but also a range of vital social, emotional and critical thinking skills. Investigations combines the need for students to be active participants in their learning through hands-on experiences, creative opportunities and collaborating with their peers.

Each classroom has eight learning areas for students to explore and investigate. These learning areas are based on the student’s interests and are designed in an open ended manner.