Community Relationships
CLARE HALLAHAN
This year has been an exciting one for community connections at The Lakes. Our focus has been on strengthening relationships with local kindergartens and Lakes families while providing rich learning experiences for our youngest learners as they begin their journey towards school.
objects). These practical, hands-on sessions encouraged learning through play, games, and movement, with families joining in to share the experience and continue learning at home. We also sent home information outlining key activities and skills, empowering families to reinforce learning and strengthening the bridge between home and school. Our community connections extended beyond the readiness program. Throughout Term 3, several local kindergartens visited us as part of their transition to ‘big school.’ Children joined us for story time, practised whole-body listening, and completed simple, engaging activities based on the books we read. These visits helped children grow in confidence and excitement for school life. A highlight of the year was welcoming our kinder friends to celebrate Science Week. Together, we conducted a colourful experiment, creating rainbows using markers and watching the colours blend—a joyful introduction to scientific thinking and discovery. We also enjoyed several whole-school community events. During Education Week, families were invited to celebrate learning at The Lakes South Morang College. Parents and carers joined their children in classroom activities while our Leadership team conducted tours for prospective families. Science Week brought another
open morning, with families working side by side on fun science activities such as making slime, creating marble runs, experimenting with rainbows, and testing paper aeroplanes. These experiences sparked curiosity and creativity while deepening family engagement in learning. Looking back, our community connections have provided rich opportunities for children, families, and educators to come together in meaningful ways. Whether through early Literacy and Numeracy sessions, kindergarten transition visits, or community events, the common thread has been collaboration. By working together, we’re giving children the best possible start— helping them feel confident, supported, and excited about learning. At The Lakes South Morang College, education is a partnership between school, family, and community. The connections we’ve built this year have strengthened both learning and belonging, and we look forward to continuing these important partnerships in the years ahead.
To begin the year, we visited each of our local kindergartens to meet our little friends in the
community. These visits were a wonderful opportunity to build relationships with both children and educators. During our visits, we ran a phonemic awareness incursion designed to support the very first steps of learning to read. Phonemic awareness—the ability to hear and play with sounds in words—is one of the strongest predictors of later reading success. Through fun, playful activities, the children listened carefully to sounds, clapped syllables, and experimented with rhyming words, building strong early literacy foundations. Across Terms 2 and 3, we ran a popular school readiness program attended by many local children and families. In Term 2, the focus was on phonemic awareness, while Term 3 shifted to early Numeracy—exploring counting and subitising (instantly recognising small groups of
18
19
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker