Welcome to Mrs Matthews' and Mrs Drover's Year 2/3 class.

 We look forward to an exciting and challenging year.  We are based in the demountable building facing the undercover area of D Block.  The room is big, bright and airy – a wonderful learning environment.

Our school as you will learn in detail by going to other areas of our home page has lots of interesting and innovative programs to engage the children in learning.

The Junior School teachers will work collaboratively to plan and implement our programs for the year. Our current class structures are Prep/One, One/Two, Two/Three and a Three/Four class where the children in year 3 will join with the rest of the Junior School for various activities. Ms. Stevens and Mrs. Watson form part of that learning team, with Ms. Stevens offering an intensive literacy program for identified year 2 children and Mrs. Watson offering a weekly session in the library where she will concentrate on author studies in a technology setting.

This is the second year that Mrs. Matthews and Mrs. Drover have worked together on a permanent part time basis teaching year 2/3. Prior to that both teachers have long experience both in this school and previous schools teaching junior school classes.

Mrs. Drover will work Monday, Tuesday and Mrs. Matthews Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. As always our door is open to discuss any issues that may arise in the course of a day. It is always better to come and have a chat rather than let issues grow bigger and get out of hand.

Our day will commence with a time for physical activity. This always includes warm up exercises, jogging and some form of skills practice e.g. skipping, balls skills.

The morning is broken into two blocks, one literacy, and the other numeracy. Science, SOSE, The Arts (including music) complete the curriculum. Technology will be integrated into all areas of the curriculum as part of a well rounded program.

State wide initiatives such as the Year 2 diagnostic Net and the National testing for Year 3 are an ongoing part of our planning. As the year progresses we will keep you informed about the process. Now might be an appropriate time to urge you to make sure you read our fortnightly newsletter, where everything to do with our school can be found. Of course the web site is also a perfect tool to use as well.

We have reintroduced our Class Level parades this year. They are a perfect way to showcase what is happening in your child’s class and you are very welcome to attend each Friday but of course a special welcome will be afforded you the week our class presents on parade. At this stage it will be Week 8 for Term 1. Remember towatch the newsletter for updates. This is part of our recognition program within the school where we like to showcase the children’s achievements.

As is traditional in our school we will be holding a parent afternoon in Week 3. This is an opportunity for you to come and meet us (if you haven’t already done so) and to find out in detail what our program entails for the year.

Our first term units revolve around Australiana and its literature and a SOSE, Science unit on conserving the environment.

We will explain our homework policy in detail at our meeting but suffice to say for now, that children will receive a homework sheet each week. It will be very self explanatory. As part of our homework, we would expect that children would read every night for ten minutes. Our belief is that reading should be part of everyday life so the “home reading” as part of their homework should include real life texts e.g. newspapers, magazines and hopefully books that you have borrowed either from the school library or the Ipswich City Council Library which is a wonderful resource.  

We look forward to seeing you all then.

Best wishes

Prue Matthews and Jillian Drover