Year 1

Welcome to our Classroom Communication

Specialist Timetable

Monday - P.E. with Mr Asquith.

Tuesday - Art with Ms Wilson.

Wednesday - Japanese with Sensei Mizushima.

Friday/Tuesday - S.T.E.M. with Mrs Williams - Alternates fortnightly

Mother's Day

A big thank you to all the mums and special people who came to our pampering session. It was so lovely to see everyone connecting with their special people. Many thanks to Cole and Dallas' Nan for the kind donation of special hand creams.

Readers

We change our readers on the day of our small reading group, this means it will be different days for each student in Year 1. We send home the reader that was introduced and read in the small group. We ask that you listen to your child read this reader nightly if possible. I've also sent home sight words that we've been learning throughout the year and you can alternate reading with these if you wish, or you can do both. We know that last year students were taking home a different reader each night and it can take some adjusting to the repetitive routine.  

English

InitiaLit has taken us on a quite the journey this term. We have reintroduced 'trigraph' meaning that 3 letters make one phoneme (sound). We've specifically looked at the trigraph 'igh' as in light, might, alright, etc. We've also learnt about the different types of words we may see in a super sentence such as adjectives, verbs and homophones. 

We discovered that an adjective is word that describes a noun, for example, red fox, sticky gluestick, stinky dog, etc. We practised using verbs in sentences to help us use our action words, such as run, hop, skip, shout, open, push, drive, etc. Homophones have been particularly fun, words with the same sound but with different spelling and meaning. For example, bean & been, hair & hare, nose & knows, etc. It has been fantastically fun to work out which witch is which. Lastly, we discovered something most shocking. Our special letters A,E,I,O,U, which we know are vowels. But we were not prepared for the news that Y makes a vowel sound and is a honorary guest of the vowel group.

Useful Word Tree

We've had quite a few additions to our Useful Word Tree; says, sister, who, mother, family, again, any, many, father, cousin, over, love and brother.

Our Storybook lessons have looked at The Lighthouse Keeper's Lunch and Harry by The Sea. Some of the word study words we've explored have been devour, scrumptious, ingenious (Lighthouse Keeper's Lunch), grateful, annoyed and shriek (Harry by the Sea).

We made our own unique lighthouses - see below.

Mathematics

During mathematics we've thoroughly enjoyed getting into hands on activities with measurement. We've explored concepts of shorter, longer, and same as with length comparing our hands, feet and arm spans. We could not believe that someone in Year 1 would have the same length shoe is Miss King! We used hefting and balance scales to determine concepts of heavy, light and same and discovered that some things look big can actually be much lighter than smaller ones. Lastly, we determined capacity is how much something can hold. We were shocked to learn that some containers appear to hold less but actually hold more than some other containers. We really enjoyed predicting and testing the capacity of a variety of objects.

Measuring Length

Measuring Weight

Religion

We've come to that liturgical time of year where we look at Pentecost. We are well versed in the Bible story of Pentecost which you can watch below. Our favourite part has been where the disciples were able to suddenly speak in different languages. Over the weeks we've created recounts, listened to scripture, role played and imagined what it would have been like.

Pope Leo

We were interested to see in the news that we now have a new Pope to lead our church. We have some pretty high hopes that Pope Leo will continue work in social justice and bring about peace in our world through kindly deeds. 

Inquiry 

This term we've been investigating Australia's natural and man-made landmarks. We began our investigation exploring Uluru and discovered that it used to be called Ayer's Rock and you could once climb on it. We learnt that it has been a sacred and meeting place for Indigenous Australians for more than 40,000 years. Did you know it's even taller than the Eiffel Tower!?! We then looked at some of the man-made structures in Australia such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House and we challenged ourselves to create our own individual man-made structures from Lego. We had a variety of creations inspired by both traditional and ingenious. Buildings on wheels, greenhouses, lookout towers and dream houses. We will then begin to investigate the natural and man-made places in our own town and backyards. 

Thank you for reading our news,

Katherine & Karen