Grade 1/2 News

Reminders: 

• Reading Diaries: We use this as a communication tool with families, to let you know how you might help your child to continue to develop their reading skills - we would really appreciate if you are able to fill it in each day that you read at home. We expect our students to read 4 nights per week, to be support their developing reading skills. We encourage this to be a mixture of your child reading, but can also be reading a picture story to your child and discussing who is in the book, what is happening etc. If you are finding home reading difficult to achieve please let you child's teacher know.
• Library Books: We are still chasing some overdue library books. If your child has a book which you have searched for and are unable to find, could you please let us know - an email to your child's teacher can be passed onto our Library staff. 
• Uniform Policy: As part of our uniform policy we require students who have hair that is longer than shoulder length to be tied back. This is for safety reasons and we would appreciate your support with this.

What we have been up to..

Welcome back to all of our 1/2 families for term 3! We have lots of exciting things happening this term.

Our students have all settled in well and we have hit the ground running with some new learning. Last week students enjoyed measuring each other using informal units (e.g. blocks, icy pole sticks etc.) and they also began a unit on Fire Education (please see the Topic section below for more information). Students explored the idea of a good fire and a bad fire and should now be able to identify three elements which make a good/safe fire. 

Some classes also had the opportunity to complete their final tennis lesson last week, due inclement weather last term.

Learning in Week 3 and 4

Mathematics: In week 3 and 4 students will continue to build their place value knowledge. Students in grade one need to be able to recognise, model, read, write and order numbers up to at least 100. Grade 2 students need to able to do the same things but using numbers up to at least 1000. We are revising this knowledge to support students as we will move onto subtraction skills following this, where place value knowledge is necessary to support the skill of subtracting.

English:  During English lessons students will be focusing on the strategy 'adjust and apply different reading rates to match texts'. This strategy supports students to develop fluency in their reading. 

We will look at the sounds ch (as in chicken ) and the voiced th sound (as in feather). In week 3, students will be learning how to read and write the common words beach, watch, watched and chips. In week 4 the words will be then, they and that.

In Writing we will return to looking narrative texts, identifying features of this text type including characters, setting and problem/solution.

Topic: During the next few weeks we will focus on the mini topic of Fire Education. The program is aimed at:

• improving children’s fire safety knowledge and skills
• facilitating the transfer of knowledge and skill to children’s families
• reducing the risk children will misuse fire or be harmed by fire,
• promoting respect, knowledge and connectedness with emergency services. 

Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships (RRRR): This semester our topic for RRRR is Gender and Identity. Students will identify their personal strengths, things they like to do and build an understanding that we are all unique.