Grade 1 & 2
End of Term 3

As Term 3 comes to a close, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on what has been a busy and rewarding few months. Our students have shown fantastic growth—academically, socially, and emotionally—and we are incredibly proud of their efforts.

From our engaging classroom learning to exciting events like Book Week, Sports Events, and RU OK? Day, Swimming…. it’s been a term full of learning and laughter. A big thank you to our students for their hard work and dedication and of course, our families, for your continued support and encouragement.

We hope everyone enjoys a safe and restful break. We look forward to welcoming students back refreshed and ready for a wonderful Term 4!

Literacy

Grade 1Z have built their understanding and skills in InitiaLit word work and grammar through activities such as using spelling sound boxes, learning the bossy 'e' rule, and exploring digraphs such as 'ar', 'or', 'ue', 'ir', 'er', 'ur', 'ou' , 'ow' and trigraphs such as 'ore' and 'igh'. They have also engaged with tricky words, sentence building, engaging in small reading group texts and comprehension tasks as well using suffixes like 'ing' and 'ed' in their writing, which has supported their understanding of past, present, and future tenses. The students really enjoy singing their Bossy'E' RAP!

Reading Update EPIC

This term in Grade 1, the children have continued to develop their research and comprehension skills through taking notes from multimodal texts. Our Grade 1 students have enjoyed viewing age-appropriate nonfiction educational videos ( about animals, machines, food, famous sports stars, space, pets, weather etc) in EPIC—which combine pictures, facts, rich vocabulary and sound.

What is Looks Like in the Grade 1 Classroom

Students write or draw facts they’ve learned during and after watching . Recording Key Facts (Note-Taking Skills) in their books and graphic organisers.
We pause frequently to let learners think about what they’ve seen and heard. Research shows that pausing helps students process information. Young learners need time to turn what they hear and see into ideas they understand and into answers to guiding questions, remembering more and organising their thinking better.
Pausing also encourages active listening, which is a key part of comprehension.
Note-taking helps us focus on important ideas instead of remembering everything. It also supports: Summarising and comprehension and speaking and sharing facts with our peers.
Multimodal texts has helped all of us who learn in different ways—visual learners can use images, auditory learners benefit from narration, and everyone gains a richer understanding when text and visuals are combined.
Multimodal learning: Builds vocabulary and background knowledge, encourages critical thinking and prepares students for modern information formats (digital, visual, audio)

These strategies have supported our classroom literacy goals:

Identifying key details in a text
Asking and answering questions
Retelling and summarising
Building knowledge from a topic over time.
This has also helped the students become independent learners who know how to gather and organise information—a key skill for all subjects, not just reading!

How You Can Support at Home

Watch short educational videos with your child and pause to ask, “What did we just learn?”
Encourage them to draw or write down facts and share them with others.
Read nonfiction books together and look for keywords, labels, or diagrams.
Celebrate their curiosity about our world,topic vocabulary and “fact-finding”!

Grade 2 students have really enjoyed their storybook lessons on The Day The Crayons Came Home. They have read the book several times, answered literal and inferential questions, learnt some new vocabulary and summarised the story. In addition, they planned their own crayon postcard to Mrs Dibb whereby they decided on what colour crayon they would be, where in ACPS they would get lost, what sort of problems they would face and why Mrs Dibb must come and collect them! Their final pieces resulted in a wonderful array of colourful postcards convincing Mrs Dibb to come and collect her crayons from around the school. On Tuesday, the grade 2s proudly presented their work to the preps, reading their postcards aloud. Check out the windows of the grade 2 classroom to see our students beautiful work.

Numeracy

Our Grade 1 students completed their money unit for this term in a fun and practical way. They set up a Mini Market in the classroom! Children took turns being shopkeepers and customers, using plastic money to "buy" and "sell" items in their play shops. This hands-on activity helped reinforce key concepts again such as identifying money, counting coins, giving change, and making smart choices. It was a fantastic opportunity to blend maths, role play, and social skills — and the children absolutely loved it!

Grade 2s have been learning about patterns and 2D shapes. They have had fun learning about different types of patterns, colours, shapes, actions or sounds, making patterns, identifying the repeating element of a pattern, playing pattern games and identifying and describing 2D shapes. For some multimodal learning, they used Google slides to make a presentation containing different 2D shapes and then labelled and described their shapes.

We read the 3 little pigs then designed our own house for little pigs. We made a table to show how many doors, windows, chimneys etc our house had. We then made another table to show how many doors, windows, chimneys etc would in 1 house, 2 houses, 3 houses, etc, building on our skip counting and number pattern skills.

SWIMMING PROGRAM

Our Grade 1 and 2 swimming program is designed to build confidence, safety, and foundational skills in the water. Through fun and engaging lessons, our students learned essential swimming techniques, water safety awareness, and developed comfort in the pool environment. With experienced instructors and a focus on skill progression, the program supported our young swimmers at every level. The children enjoyed their swimming lessons especially the bus rides up and back.

Grade 1Z swimming stars!

Grade 1 Resilience Program – Helping Others with Empathy

In our final Resilience Program session before the term break, our Grade 1 students reflected on the powerful impact of helping others. Through thoughtful discussions, the children explored how acts of kindness and empathy not only support those around us but also uplift our own moods. They shared personal examples of how they’ve been there for others and recognised how small, caring actions can make a big difference. Together, we discovered that being helpful and empathetic creates a happier, more connected world for everyone.

FOOTY DAY

We had an amazing time celebrating Footy Day with all our students! It was wonderful to see everyone dressed in their favourite team colours and showing so much spirit and enthusiasm. Throughout the day, the children took part in fun footy-themed activities including lots of fun and laughter.

Footy Day not only brought excitement to our school but also helped promote healthy habits and the importance of staying active. We thank all the parents for supporting this event and encouraging your children to participate with such enthusiasm.

We look forward to more fun and community-building days like this in Term 4!

Go amazing Grade 1Z teams!