Farewell, Au revoir, See you later and Cheers Community Connections
CLARE HALLIHAN
A new venture for The Lakes this year was our very own school readiness program. This involved six sessions for our 2025 enrolled families, allowing for them to come into our learning spaces and engage in fun and educational experiences. We worked on recognising and repeating syllables, rhyme and individual sounds in words. We also introduced our systematic synthetic phonics program, so newly enrolled students and families will be off to a flying start next year. This program also taught important social skills like saying hello to our friends, telling the group what our name is and working alongside friends. Students grew significantly in their confidence over the course of the program, and we are so proud of them. The final highlight was visiting our local kinder rooms for a bubble incursion. The children enjoyed using bubble mix and straws to blow humongous bubbles. They were so excited when they were able to see how large their bubbles were becoming. After this they enjoyed a bubble colouring in to help celebrate Science Week. We look forward to further strengthening these relationships in 2025.
2024 has seen us embark on some exciting community connection opportunities that continue to strengthen our already strong relationships with our Kinder colleagues and local community members. The start of the year saw The Lakes visiting our local kindergartens to discuss goal setting. Kinder students then thought about what they wanted to achieve this year and responded to this through drawing. It was also a great opportunity for our College to model oral language structures that lead to speaking in full sentences. These visits also ensure that our enrolled children have a familiar face when they start with us which helps with their confidence and settling in. A little later in the year we attended Parent/Carer Information sessions at Paradise Kids Early Learning Centre and Little Learners Early Education. Both sessions involved presenting to prospective families about school readiness, information about starting school and what they can be doing at home to build the early foundations of phonological awareness. We love to go out into our community and speak with children and families about the foundations for becoming literate, numerate, and enhancing their social skills development and emotional regulation needed for school.
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