Year 1/2 

Celebrating Learning

What we have been up to: 

With a big focus on improving resilience and growth mindsets this term, our year 1/2 classes have been busy discussing and making our class ‘learning pits' and mantras to encourage students to keep trying. Students will inevitably face challenges at school, and we want to set them up for success by encouraging them to be a problem solver, see mistakes as learning curves and to seek help from their teacher and peers.

Maths:

Over the first few weeks of term, the year 1/2s have been focussing on counting groups, making sure that we only say one number when pointing at one object. Students have been learning how to efficiently count big groups of objects by putting them in columns, groups or rows of 2, 5 and 10. We’ve seen some great strategies being used! These counting strategies have married well with our collection of class data (favourite games, food, colours etc.)

Literacy:

This term, the year 1/2 classes have kicked off our phonics sessions by reviewing the Little Learners Love Literacy Stages 1-6. These stages cover the consonant-vowel-consonant blends such as ‘mat’, ‘dog’ and ‘sit. We’ve then moved into blending words with adjacent consonant blends such as ‘stop’ and ‘flag’. We then reviewed our consonant digraphs: sh (shop), wh (what), ch (chop), tch (watch), ph (dolphin) and th (think). 

As we introduce the writer’s process to our students, we have been focussing on gathering writing seeds which are ideas for writing that might come from books, music, objects etc.

What’s to come in the next two weeks:

As we continue to establish our very important classroom agreements, mantras and learning pits, the year 1/2 students will enter the next phase of their integrated learning by participating in a process drama. 

In the coming weeks, students will continue to unpack writing seeds. We will start introducing the next stages of the writer’s process by planning and drafting recounts. We will also be using our emerging spelling and writing skills to learn about how to write a sentence. 

The Little Learners Love Literacy stage 7.1 sounds that we are focussing on for weeks 4-5 are: ay (play), ai (snail), ee (seed) and ea (beach). To reinforce their learning, students could be practising their spelling at home. 

In Maths, we are continuing our data collection about our students’ preferred icy pole flavour. Students have been practising the skills of asking questions, gathering information, creating tables using tally marks and turning these tables into bar graphs. We will then move on to observing our data, making observations and comparisons between data and finishing off this topic with a sweet icy pole treat!