Grade 1/2 News

Reminders: 

• Jumpers - The cooler weather is fast approaching. Over the holidays could you please ensure your child's clothing is labelled so that we can return jumpers to their owner.
• Hair - We have noticed a number of students with longer hair, coming to school without their hair tied back. Our uniform policy states that if a student has hair past shoulder length it must be tied back, we ask for this to be done for safety purposes. Thank you for your support with this.

What we have been up to...

During the last fortnight we have participated in lots of activities. On Harmony Day students rotated in house groups and completed different cultural activities. In class we have been reading about and making Magic Hats! We have discussed upcoming events such as Easter and ANZAC Day.

On Monday morning we had the privilege of having Mr Joel Anderson (Darby’s dad) come to speak to us about the importance and meaning of ANZAC Day. Mr Anderson is currently a Senior Technical Advisor in the Australian Defence Force, maintaining and repairing weapons. Joel has been involved in the army since he was 17 years old and joined the Army as an infantry soldier.  When Joel was 29 he transferred to the Regular Army as a Fitter Armourer. Joel assisted in keeping 2000 Sydney Olympics safe, was a peace keeper in East Timor, and went to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

Mr Anderson brought in various uniforms, hats, books, medals and explained the symbol of the red poppy, why we hear The Last Post and have a minute of silence on ANZAC Day. It was interesting to listen to Mr Anderson speak about why ANZAC day is important to him, his family and army friends too. He answered our questions and talked a little bit about what life was like as a soldier and living in different countries. He explained and demonstrated how we salute and why we hold our hands a certain way, and he read the book ‘ANZAC Ted’ to us. Mr Anderson then joined 1/2 Murphy for an ANZAC activity. We would like to thank Mr Anderson for all his time and effort. We really appreciated this class talk and enjoyed learning about the spirit of ANZAC Day.

Last week students also spent a session with Mrs Hartney, looking at symbols relating to ANZAC day. Students discussed the meaning of each and then did a matching activity.

Our students also ran their Cross Country race on Monday. We were very proud of all our students for giving it their best shot and having lots of fun. Thank you to the many family and friends who came along to support us!

Throughout the term students across the school have been working towards a whole school reward. Yesterday they got to enjoy a 'Chipnic' and an icypole. The photos indicate they were pretty happy with their efforts! Hopefully next term the display of school values will continue and we can get to the next whole school reward!

Learning in Weeks 1 & 2

Mathematics: During the first fortnight of Term 2, we will be focusing on addition. Students will be learning efficient strategies to solve addition problems. We will look at doubles (e.g. 2+2, 4+4 etc.) and near doubles (2+1, 4+3 etc.); students will also practice their knowledge of tens facts. We will also begin looking at statistics, collecting data and interpreting what it tells us.

English: As part of Reading sessions students will be looking at 'using punctuation to enhance phrasing and prosody in their reading'. For example stopping at a full stop, pausing at commas and changing their voice to reflect an exclamation mark.

We will look at the sounds 'oa' as in boat (using the following spelling choices oa, o_e, ow, o) and 'ar' as in star (using the spelling choices ar, a). Students will look for these sounds when reading and will also practise reading and writing common words containing these sounds (e.g. know, show, snow & car, park, dark and shark).

In Writing we will continue to build on our existing knowledge about recounts and will also look at building on our sentence level writing, by adding adjectives to make our writing more interesting.

Topic: Our topic next term will be 'Stimulating Science'. We will explore a number of concepts during this unit including forces, sounds, seasons and properties of different materials.