Year 1

Dear Parents, Carers and Families, 

Welcome to Term 4! We hope you had a fantastic break and are feeling excited for an exciting term coming up. We have lots of fun and exciting things planned and we have no doubt that it will absolutely fly by! 

Important Upcoming Dates

• Thursday 20th October: Rippon Lea Estate Excursion for 1C and 1B 
• Friday 21st October: Rippon Lea Estate Excursion for 1A and 1D 
• Tuesday 20th December: Student Free Day 

Excursion - Important Information 

We are very excited for our excursion to Rippon Lea Estate next week for our inquiry unit, focusing on the past. Students must arrive at school at 8:15am as the bus will be departing at 8:30am. Unfortunately, the bus can not wait for late comers, so it is really important that your child is at school, in their classroom at 8:15am. Students will need to ensure that they are in full school uniform. Students can bring a small backpack or their school bag with their brain food, recess, lunch and a water bottle. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact your child’s classroom teacher. 

Uniform and Hats 

As it is Term 4 and we are a sun smart school, all students are expected to wear the Gilgai Plains Primary School bucket hat, when playing outside. If they don’t have a hat, they will need to play in a shady area. Also a friendly reminder, that all students must be in full school uniform and wearing black shoes. 

Charged iPads and Headphones 

We kindly ask that your child brings their iPad to school every day, fully charged as well as headphones. 

Learning in Year 1

Literacy

In Reading we are learning that the phoneme/sound ‘er’ can be represented by the graphemes /ir/ /ur/ and /er/. We have also learnt that sometimes when words end in the ‘er’ sound, it can actually sound like /u/, like in the word ‘summer’, so now we have what’s called a ‘spelling voice’. Next week we will be learning that the phoneme/sound ‘air’, as in airy, fairy, air is represented by the grapheme /air/. In Writing we are continuing to learn how to write a recount, including who, what, where, when and why details and making sure the events are in order. We have also been writing ‘text to self connections’. This is where we read a book and write about what the book reminds us of in our lives. 

Numeracy 

In Maths we have been learning all about fractions! A lot of our fraction lessons have been making us feel a little bit hungry, there has been lots of talk about cutting pizzas and pies in half and in quarters. We have also been learning how to identify half of a collection. For example, if I had 10 jelly beans, and half of them were pink, how many jelly beans would be pink? Learning about fractions has also helped us with learning about how to tell the time. We are getting very good at telling the time to the hour and to the half hour. 

Inquiry 

Our Inquiry unit this term is called ‘Then and Now’. We are learning about how the past and present are different in lots of different areas such as; toys, schools, technology, houses, transport and games. 

SEL 

This week in SEL we became familiar with the 24 VIA Character Strengths. We identified what we thought our personal strengths were and realised that they are sort of like super powers! We also identified some character strengths that we would like to use as our own personal goals, for example ‘perseverance’ - to never give up, even when things get a little bit tough.