Year 1
Welcome to Year 1
It has been a delight to get to know all our Year 1 members so far. We've welcomed Isaac, Leah and Leighton who have joined us from other schools near and far. We've hit the ground running with the implementation of our new Curriculum Magnify. This encompasses the InitiaLit program during English and the Ochre program during Mathematics. More information about these programs will be delivered on the upcoming curriculum night on March 12th (Time to be decided).
It was fantastic to meet with families during our Parent Teacher Interviews. If you were unable to come in, please feel free to email me to set up a time to meet. As I said during these meetings, my door is always open if you wish to visit or discuss anything. If you need to contact me, my email is kking@sjeuroa.catholic.edu.au
Our Learning Support Officer is Karen Goss. You will have seen Karen throughout last year in the year 1/2 classroom. We are fortunate to have Karen with us, she's highly skilled and has extensive experience in the junior years. Karen has certainly enjoyed learning about our new classmates and looks forward to a productive year.
Specialist Timetable
Tuesday - Art with Mrs Watson.
Wednesday - Japanese with Sensai Mizushima.
Thursday - P.E. with Mr McKernan and S.T.E.M. with Mr Asquith.
Readers
As many of you are aware we've started our home reading program. It's very different to how things would have been done last year. This is to coincide with the new curriculum and the materials it entails. Previously you would have a new book each night, read it and return it. Now, students still read each night, however they can re-read the text multiple times. Students take home 2-3 books for the week and reread them as much as possible. This is to build confidence through repetition. Feel free to use the focus words in the back of the books and practise these as well. As we get used to our new routine, we'll start to send home activities to accompany the readers.
We change our readers every Friday or Monday - Families can choose which night works for them best. Please make sure you're signing the reader diary so we know that students are reading with an adult.
English
The InitiaLit program in Year 1 is a structured literacy program designed to support students in building strong reading and writing skills. It focuses on essential areas such as phonics (the relationship between sounds and letters), spelling, and reading fluency. Through engaging activities and targeted lessons, InitiaLit helps students develop a solid foundation in decoding words, improving their reading comprehension, and constructing simple sentences. The program is evidence-based and designed to be accessible for all learners, especially those who may need extra support. With regular practice, InitiaLit helps children become more confident and capable readers and writers, setting them up for long-term success in literacy.
Over the weeks we've worked on syllables, phonemes, vowels and digraphs. Make sure you ask your child to sing the Vowel Song.
Our Storybook lessons have focused on Fang Fang's Chinese New Year, Josaphine Wants to Dance and Sam and Dave Dig A Hole. Storybooks change each fortnight and run alongside InitiaLit lessons provided with each text. We particularly enjoyed Sam and Dave Dig A Hole. At the end of the story, look out for how the tree, cat, and flower have changed.
In writing, we have been working our handwriting. Throughout the weeks we've worked through our InitiLit handwriting books and practised m, s, t, a and p. We've also enjoyed using our sound and letter knowledge to help spell words for our InitiaLit activity book.
We have sprouted a 'Useful Word Tree' in our classroom where we display words that can have confusing vowel sounds. These words are focused on during the InitiaLit lessons and referred to repeatedly throughout the weeks. So far our useful words are; there, very, have, then, said, put, were, was, you, then and are.
We also have a helpful house of words that come from our storybooks and we explore the meaning of these words and how we can use them in sentences in our writing.
Mathematics
Throughout the last few weeks we've been collecting data using tally marks.
We discovered that tally marks are an excellent way of recording numbers and bundling them into 5s really help us so we don't have to count each stroke. We've counted many different things, but our favourite was watching from our classroom window to see the different colour cars going by. We discovered white and silver were the most popular car colour. We certainly didn't expect to see a pink car, however we weren't let down.
Last week we practised counting forwards and backwards 0-100 and this week we are looking at what happens when we go beyond. We've noticed some very familiar patterns. We'll then begin to look at how we can count by 10s forwards and backwards and what the patterns look like.
Religion
Currently our Source of Life unit is We Can Pray in Different Ways. In this unit, students have the opportunity to explore their relationship with God and with others. We started by looking at what makes a good relationship and we thanked God for the special people in our lives that love and care for us. We will learn some formal prayers and how we can pray in may different ways to deepen our relationship with God.
Inquiry
We've been exploring groups in our community and imagined what it would be like without some of these groups. We decided that communities need many community groups to have a safe and happy town. For example, police, fire, ambulance, schools, hospitals, clinics, libraries, pools, SES, shops, supermarkets, service stations, mechanics, farms, parks, charities, daycare and kinders just to name a few. We then took the opportunity to design our own towns. Today we started to write thank you letters to our 3 main emergency services for keeping us safe. We shall have some examples to show in our next addition.
Thank you for reading our news.
Katherine & Karen