Year 1

What a busy and exciting few weeks we’ve had in Year 1!

We have been exploring the magical world of fairy tales, reading Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin and The Frog Prince. As we read, we’ve been discovering what makes a fairy tale special—problems and solutions, settings, characters, and those all-important magical elements! Our class discussions have been fantastic, with students sharing their thoughts before, during, and after reading. They’ve also been expanding their vocabulary with lots of new and interesting words such as retrieved, boasting, wailed and glared!

In phonics, we’ve been busy mastering digraphs and keeping our voices on to sound out tricky words. This has been helping students improve their blending, accuracy and reading fluency—important skills for becoming confident readers!

In writing, we’ve been working on making our sentences stronger and more interesting by adding adjectives, joining words and sensory details. We’ve also been learning how to put events in order using the fairy tales that we’ve been reading. Soon, we’ll be writing and publishing our very own short fairy tales!

In maths, we’ve been diving into all things numbers, working with numbers up to 120! We’ve used a range of hands-on materials, like ten frames, bundles, hundreds charts, place value charts and MAB blocks, to help us understand how numbers are built. Students have been ordering, comparing and breaking numbers into tens, ones, and even hundreds with growing confidence.

For wellbeing, we’ve been reconnecting with our Kimochi friends, Lovey Dove and Bug, who have been helping us learn about bravery and how to create friendly spaces for others. In Play-Based Learning, we’ve been having so much fun! Whether it’s building amazing structures, helping sick animals in the vet clinic, putting on puppet shows, or exploring sensory bins, the creativity and collaboration have been wonderful to see. Our skill for our most recent sessions have been communicating effectively with our peers.

I am so proud of how engaged and enthusiastic the students have been—it’s shaping up to be a fantastic term!

Some highlights so far are…

Gray - Auslan

Clancy - Quick Maths

Lauren - Learning how to clean our caddies

Sam - Quick Maths

Gwen - PE

Conor - Auslan

Zeke - Wellbeing - learning about feelings

Abby - Handwriting

James I - Writing

Layla - Maths - skip counting