Year 1, Term 1, 2024

Term 1, 2024

The Year One students have settled in seamlessly to their new learning environment and have made a great start to the new school year. The teachers and students have enjoyed getting to know one another and are very much looking forward to a year filled with fun and learning.

The students have been reflecting on how the decisions we make can affect our relationships with one another, focusing on creating a harmonious and inclusive classroom environment.

In line with our unit of inquiry, 'How the World Works', the students will be immersed in exploring, experimenting and understanding how weather affects our lives and environments.

UNITS OF INQUIRY

WHO WE ARE

The decisions people make influence their relationships with each other.

Concepts: responsibility, perspective

Lines of inquiry:

The attributes that can help us learn together
The way our interactions contribute to a harmonious classroom

HOW THE WORLD WORKS

The weather affects our lives and environment.

Concepts: change, causation, form

Lines of inquiry

The meaning of weather
The way the weather affects the way we live (global impact)
Changes in weather patterns

Literacy

The children are encouraged to read every night and record their reading in their ‘Take Home Reading Journal’. They are required to bring their green reading folders to school, daily, to ensure their books are changed.

This term the children will be building their reading stamina through ‘Read to Self’. We will be introducing the CAFÉ Strategies and encouraging children to become independent readers. The CAFÉ approach focuses on:

Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency and Expanding vocabulary.

The students will participate in Big Book activities, Guided Reading sessions and individual reading with their teacher on a weekly basis.

Students will be exposed to the qualities which make for good writing through the Writing Traits.

These are:

Ideas - the main message
Organisation - the internal structure of the piece
Voice - the personal tone and flavour of the author's message
Word Choice - the vocabulary a writer chooses to convey meaning
Sentence Fluency - the rhythm and flow of the language
Conventions - the mechanical correctness of writing which includes basic punctuation skills such as capital letters, full stops, exclamation marks and question marks

They will be using their Writer’s Notebook which they fill with their thoughts, memories, favourite words, phrases, lists, ideas for stories as well as practising aspects of spelling and grammar.

This term the children will be focusing on punctuation and applying it appropriately to their reading and writing. We will be exploring adjectives and nouns through our Literacy and Inquiry work.

The children will continue the SMART Spelling approach and will be choosing 6 words to focus on each week. Every Monday they will learn a new spelling focus and we encourage the children to learn their new words and their meanings. They will bring home a spelling sheet and activity for their ‘Home Spelling’ book each Monday and are encouraged to practice their spelling words and complete up to two activities during the week. This book can remain at home.

Year One students will participate in Show and Tell based around their unit of inquiry. Each week, on a Friday, the children will have the opportunity to share something related to the current unit. We look forward to many interesting and exciting items and information being shared!

This term, the children will deliver an oral presentation to their classmates as a part of our unit of inquiry “How the World Works”, using information they have learnt and researched during our unit. It will be our final Learning Task for the term.

Numeracy

We are looking forward to an exciting year in Numeracy as we continue to develop the student’s skills in Number knowledge. We will be focusing on the introduction of ‘The Math Daily 3’ of Math by Myself, Math with Someone and Math Writing. We will also continue to focus on using concrete materials to reinforce learning and clarify the students understanding of concepts through practical, real-life experiences.

This term the students will be introduced to the notion of a number line, hundreds chart and bead frames as numeracy tools. They will continue to work on basic number recognition and correct number formation with numbers from 0-120. We will explore Place Value using tens frames, the positional value of 2-digit numbers, odd and even numbers, number patterns and identify numbers before/after.

The students will continue to learn how to describe the duration of a year, months, weeks, days and hours and practice sequence events accordingly.

We will also be collecting data related to real life experiences and using the information for organising and creating pictographs. The students will also be introduced to tally marks to help record the data they have collected.

Inclusive Approaches

This term we are working on building respect, respectful relationships and tolerance for our peers and will continue learning about Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness (GEM) through the Resilience Project.

We will be introducing the Cyber Safety Project with an emphasis on empowering young people to self-manage their own privacy and security and to be responsible digital citizens when using connected technologies.

The Zones of Regulation, developed by Leah Kuypers, is a systematic framework that helps individuals, especially children, understand and manage their emotions. It categorizes emotions and states of alertness into four color-coded zones: Blue Zone (low alertness), Green Zone (optimal alertness), Yellow Zone (heightened alertness), and Red Zone (extremely high alertness). By fostering emotional awareness, teaching self-regulation strategies, creating a Zones-friendly environment, and using visual supports, we empower children with essential skills for emotional well-being and self-control.

Whole School Focus on Learner Profile Attributes

February - Caring
March - Risk-taker

Key Dates

Week 4 – Cyber Safety week

Cyber Safety Incursion - Wednesday 21

Curriculum Day – March 8

Labour Day - Monday 11

School Photos – March 12

School Fete – March 23

Last Day of Term 1 - Thursday 28 March 2.30pm