Grade 1 & 2

As we reach the end of Week 5 in Term 1, it has been wonderful to see our Grade 1 and 2 students settling so beautifully into classroom routines. The children are becoming more confident with remembering their specialist timetable, bringing along homework, and returning their library books each week. We are also so proud of the way they are taking responsibility for changing their readers as they grow in confidence and skill. Thank you for your ongoing support at home as we continue to build strong, positive habits together.

Literacy

Grade 2 students are off to a flying start with their literacy program, eagerly partaking in our structured InitiaLit program comprising of spelling, comprehension, grammar and storybook lessons. Students have enjoyed learning about imaginative texts, reading Willy The Wimp and writing their own imaginative texts and recounts throughout these first few weeks at school. We have also been slowing introducing laptops, with students being given the opportunity to publish some of their writing pieces once they have gone through the drafting, writing, editing and teacher conferencing process. 

Grade 1 has eased back into Initial Lit revising the letters and sounds that they had learnt in Prep. The class has enjoyed writing words and sounds on their whiteboards. They have enjoyed listening to some old picture story books - The Five Chinese Brothers and Tikki Tikki Tembo as well as more modern writing like Josephine who loved to Dance. They have been writing recounts and are beginning to write their own imaginative texts focusing on the beginning, middle (problem) and the end (solution).

Maths

In Maths, Grade 2 have completed a patterns unit on patterns in number, shapes and colours and are now learning about place value. Our learning intentions for our place value unit are to be able to represent numbers to at least 1000 and to partition, rearrange and rename two and three digit numbers in terms of their parts. Students have been working collaboratively with lots of hands on materials such as counters, MAB, teddies and unifix, looking at place value abacus, place value charts and MAB and enjoying breaking numbers down into thousands, hundreds, tens and ones and putting them back together again. 2D absolutely love the place value song and are beginning to know all of the words.

The grade Ones have also been creating patterns, following patterns, continuing (or building on) patterns and finding patterns. Patterns with rhythm, colours and numbers. They have enjoyed counting by 2's, 10's and 5's with some students also finding patterns with 3's and 4's.

This week the focus has been on shape. Finding shapes in our environment, looking at the similarities and differences in shapes, understanding how a rectangle and square differ. The class had a great time making shapes with Geoboards and elastic bands individually and then then decided to join forces and create a great big shape picture by joing the geoboards together.

The Resilence Project

Grade 2 students have been learning about transitioning to Grade 2 and in their recent lesson learned about spreading kindness through compliments. This lesson practised the GEM principle of empathy whereby students explored how meaningful and heartfelt compliments have the power to uplift and empower others. It was great to see students stop and think about how they could compliment the character of another classmember and describe the emotions they experienced when giving and receiving compliments. Kindness is is a superpower in the classroom and we encourage students to show kindess towards their classmates, peers, teaching staff and the broader community at all times.

CPR

We would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to parent volunteers Bec and Lauren for giving up their time to teach our Grade 1 and 2 students about CPR and what they can do to help in case of an emergency. Students learned about the 3 steps to follow if they see someone in need:

Call 000

Push

Shock

They were able to practise perfoming CPR on different sized CPR manikins and learn about the importance of being able to provide their address over the phone to emergency services. Our homework task was to go home and learn our address if we didn't already know it. The wiggles video was shown as a great prompt on what to do - here is the link if you would like to watch it together at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kvli78HlRk

Pancake Tuesday

Grade 1- celebrated Pancake Tuesday (a week late). The students all followed a recipe, measured, stirred, cooked and ate the pancakes. Thanks for our helpers that supported the class to achieve this. The students were super happy with the taste of their pancakes. Mr Webber was also lucky enough to sample the classes cooking.