Year 1

Term 3 Reflection: 

Term 3 was a wonderful term filled with learning, exploration and creativity. Students developed their literacy skills through our Awesome Australia inquiry, researching Australian animals, exploring landmarks and creating their own writing. In Mathematics, students strengthened their number knowledge, addition and problem-solving skills while exploring measurement and data. Through MSL, students continued to build their phonics and spelling knowledge, and we also enjoyed celebrating the Commonwealth Games, Book Week and finishing the term with poetry. It was wonderful to see students grow in confidence and celebrate their learning throughout the term! 

Term 4 Overview: 

Welcome back to Term 4! We hope everyone had a wonderful and relaxing break. We are so excited to begin our final term of Year 1!

Term 4 is sure to be filled with lots of learning, fun and exciting experiences. We can’t wait to see the students continue to grow, learn and build their confidence as we make the most of our final weeks together.

Literacy and STEAM - A Journey in Time

This term, students will embark on “A Journey in Time”, exploring dinosaurs, Ancient Egypt, Vikings and toys from the past. They will develop their understanding of the past and present by using timelines, artefacts, photographs and other sources to investigate how people, animals, places and technology have changed over time.

We will begin with dinosaurs, identifying different types, their features, habitats and diets. Students will explore herbivores and carnivores and investigate how scientists use fossils and other evidence to learn about dinosaurs and how they lived. We are excited to visit the Museum to extend our learning and explore dinosaurs firsthand!

Next, we will explore Ancient Egypt. Students will learn about daily life and key features of Ancient Egyptian civilisation, including pharaohs, pyramids, mummies and hieroglyphs. We will then travel to Scandinavia to learn about the Vikings, exploring their reasons for travelling and settling in new places, and how their longships helped them explore and trade.

Our final focus will be toys from the past. Students will compare toys and childhood experiences across generations, interview family members about toys they played with and explore traditional games such as croquet, quoits, jacks and skipping. They will investigate how technology has changed the toys children play with and place toys on a timeline from the past to the present.

In Literacy, our focus will be on imaginative, persuasive and procedural texts. During Reader’s Workshop, students will read Frankie and the Fossil with a focus on making predictions, making connections and inferring. This story will support students to understand narrative structure as they plan and write their own narratives inspired by dinosaurs, Vikings and Ancient Egypt.

Students will also complete a Media Arts stop-motion dinosaur project, designing characters and sets before creating their own short film. They will write procedures explaining how to create a stop-motion film, focusing on using specific verbs to clearly sequence each step.

To conclude our toy investigation, students will participate in a woodwork incursion to design and build their own toy. They will then create a persuasive advertisement, using persuasive language and techniques to convince others to buy their creation.

MSL 

This term, students will continue their MSL learning three times a week, building confidence in reading, spelling and phonics through fun, hands-on and multisensory activities. We will revise familiar sounds and spelling patterns while introducing new rules to help students become stronger, more confident readers and writers!  

Some of the new rules we will be learning include: 

• eigh quadgraph 
• Present tense suffixes: -s/-es/-ies
• Homophones: same sound, different spelling 
• Compound words 
• Ch: One spelling three sounds - Charlie spent Christmas in Chicago
• Adding suffixes
• Past tense verbs - adding -ed

Maths 

In Term 4, our focus will be on building students’ fluency and confidence with numbers. We want students to become confident mathematicians who can draw on a range of strategies to work things out, rather than simply relying on memorising answers.

Our subtraction learning will continue, with students exploring strategies such as subtracting doubles, using their friends of 10 and bridging to 10. Integer blocks, drawings and number sentences will help students see and understand the mathematics behind each strategy.

Money will also be explored through practical, real-life situations. Students will practise adding different amounts together to find a total and working out how much money would be left after making a purchase. Another focus this term will be time. Students will learn to read and represent times to o’clock and half past, while developing their understanding of how the hands on a clock work together.

Throughout the term, students will be encouraged to make it, draw it, write it and say it, helping them to build a strong understanding of numbers and confidence in explaining their mathematical thinking.

Important dates 

Melbourne Museum: Wednesday 14th October 

Disco: Thursday 15th October

Author Visit: Friday 23rd October

Melbourne Cup Public Holiday: 3rd November 

Little Woodworkers Incursion: 30th November and 1st December

Last day Term 4: 18th December