Year 1 News
From Yolanda Andrews, Year 1A teacher
The last fortnight has been full of amazing, astronomical alliteration activities and delightfully diabolical dictation during our daily practice. You get it!
Reading
We have been practising making predictions before, during and after listening to a shared text. We have been learning to justify our predictions using picture clues, textual evidence or their own prior knowledge about similar fiction books. It has been wonderful to see students becoming more confident in explaining their thinking and using evidence to support their ideas.
Writing
We have been learning about rhyming couplets, which are fun little poems made up of two short lines that usually rhyme. To make the task even more exhilarating, students created their own wacky characters, inspired by the wonderfully whimsical world of Dr Seuss, and wrote rhyming couplets about them! It has been fantastic to see their creativity and imagination shine through in their writing.
Maths
We have been working hard consolidating our understanding of place value and building our fluency with mental addition. In particular, the students have been having lots of fun practising their mental addition skills by playing a wonderful game called Salute!
Students worked in groups of three. Two players held a playing card to their forehead without looking at it, while the third player mentally added the two numbers together and called out the total. Each player could see the other player's card, so they had to use their mental addition skills to work out which number was on their own forehead. The first player to call out the correct number was the winner!
It was a fantastic game that had everyone thinking, calculating and, most importantly, having fun. We strongly recommend giving Salute a try at home, why should we keep all the fun at school?
Wellbeing
We have been learning about the importance of recognising and understanding how our bodies respond to different emotions. Students have been discussing strategies that can help them manage big emotions and return to a calm and ready-to-learn state.
To support this learning, students created their own booklets, where they identified a big emotion they had experienced, explored how their bodies felt in that moment, and recorded strategies that helped them manage the emotion and return to learning.
Their honesty and personal insights into their own feelings have been truly inspiring. Students demonstrated such wonderful maturity, self-awareness and openness during these Wellbeing sessions, and we have been incredibly proud of their thoughtful reflections.
Thank you once again for sharing in our Year 1 adventures! The students are super keen to remind you all about some exciting upcoming events.
Stay tuned for Book Week in Week 7! It is always a huge week of fun, creativity and celebration, and we can't wait to share all the excitement with you!
