Stage 1

Welcome to our first Stage 1 newsletter item for Term 2. We are excited to share what has been happening in our classrooms and highlight the learning experiences your children have been engaging in. 

Clothing reminder

As the weather cools down, please remember to send your child to school with warm clothes, such as a jumper and/or jacket. It is also important to label all belongings with your child's name to help keep track of their items. Thank you for your cooperation.

Home Reading

Home readers are due back on the day assigned by each classroom teacher. If a student does not return their book, we cannot issue another reader until the previous one has been returned. Students are encouraged to read their home reader multiple times to help improve their fluency and automaticity.

Thalgarrah Excursions

We have had a busy start to the term, with each class visiting the Thalgarrah Environmental Educational Centre over the past few weeks, and the students thoroughly enjoyed the experiences. The hands-on activities and engaging sessions provided a wonderful opportunity for the students to connect with nature and learn about the environment.

Please take a moment to check out the photos below, showcasing the fun and learning that took place during our excursions. We're excited to share these memorable moments with you!

English

Early this term, our writing focus will be to develop the skills needed to write an information report. Students will learn how to gather facts, organise their ideas, and present information clearly. In addition to our writing focus, we continue to learn new spelling strategies in InitiaLit. We are also reading decodable texts to practise our developing reading skills, alongside moderately complex texts to challenge and enhance comprehension. This balanced approach will help strengthen both our writing and reading abilities.

In reading, we are learning:

• to make predictions about a book
• new vocabulary
• to summarise a text.

We are successful when we: 

• contribute to class discussions
• recall the meaning of new vocabulary
• recall and verbalise parts of a story.

In writing, we are learning to write an informative text.

We are successful when we: 

• write facts about an animal
• use our plan to organise our writing
• use capital letters at the start of sentences
• use end punctuation
• use a variety of conjunctions to write compound sentences.

Mathematics

Stage 1 students are continuing to participate in differentiated maths groups, allowing us to tailor learning experiences to meet individual needs. Our current focus is on whole number, patterns, and representing and separating quantities.

We are also learning about measurement. Through engaging activities, students explore how to measure length, area, and volume using informal units, helping them develop practical skills and a deeper understanding of the world around them.

We are learning to:

•  measure the length, area, and volume of objects using informal units to understand their size and space.

We are successful when we can:

• use informal units to measure the length of objects and compare different lengths
• use informal units to measure the area of surfaces and describe how much space they cover
• use informal units to measure the volume of objects and explain how much space they take up
• describe the steps taken to measure length, area, and volume using informal units
• use my measurements to answer questions about the size and space of different objects.

Rebecca Bourke, Claudia Campbell, Nicole Frost, Kathy McMillan, Sjaan Mitchell, Shelli Morse & Jennine Wilson

Stage 1 Teachers