Year 1 Term 4 Overviews

Dear Year 1 Families,

Welcome back to school for Term 4, the last term of Year 1! We are very proud of what students have achieved and have enjoyed watching them grow throughout the year.

We recently had a wonderful time at the Year 1 Stay Late. The children enjoyed jumping on the jumping castles, making hats and bracelets, playing with giant legos and dancing at the disco. We enjoyed a pizza dinner before heading home. The evening is a great way to get the students ready for their Sleepover in Grade 2.

Important Dates: Kaboom Kids Sports - 14th November (payment due October 31st)

Reading

In reading this term, students will understand and discuss how characters are feeling in a text using the clues in the words, illustrations and their prior knowledge to infer how a character's feelings can change throughout the text.  Students will use the characters, plot events, problem and solution to summarise fiction texts.  When exploring non-fiction texts students will be able to identify features and how they are organised.  This will be explored through procedural texts (recipes, how to, how things are made). Students will understand what a contraction is, such as we’ll (we will), it’s (it is) etc. and be able to identify and read them in texts. 

Writing

In writing, students will focus on creating procedural texts and narratives.  Procedural texts will be driven by writing experiences, such as making lemonade, followed by students writing texts using correct structure and an expanded vocabulary of new verbs and adverbs. In our narratives unit, mentor texts will be explored to support development of ideas, word choice, sentence fluency and organisation. Throughout the term, students will explore different ideas for writing, craft well built sentences and identify how sentences are sequenced. They will be adventurous in using vocabulary such as adverbs, actions verbs, adjectives and nouns to help readers visualise the characters, setting and the events in their narrative. Each week, students will engage in SMART Spelling and phonics to help improve their understanding of spelling patterns.

Numeracy

In numeracy this term, students will describe the duration and sequence of events using years, months, weeks, days and hours. They will continue to develop their knowledge of fractions and halves and recognising one-half as one of two equal parts of a whole. They will move onto an Addition and Subtraction unit where they will use a variety of calculation strategies to  recall and demonstrate proficiency with addition and subtraction facts. They will use this knowledge to answer real life maths problems.

There will be a continual focus on place value, as well as being able to skip count by 2s, 5s, and 10s and using this to help them count collections efficiently. 

Social Emotional learning

In SEL (social emotional learning) this term, students will be collaborating with their peers in a range of different STEM tasks. Throughout these tasks, students will have the opportunity to observe, reflect and describe what respectful teamwork Looks Like, Sounds Like and Feels Like. Students will be supported in identifying their own strengths that they bring to a team, while practising using a growth mindset to help build confidence and resilience when attempting new and challenging tasks. Students will have a big focus this term on respectful communication by exploring different points of views, opinions and beliefs. They will have the opportunity to listen to different opinions and share their own opinions, building their appreciation for the differences of the people around them and ability to respect and work alongside others with different opinions successfully. 

Inquiry

This term in inquiry, students will investigate the statement “Throughout history some aspects of daily life have changed and some have remained the same.” Students begin this unit by exploring their own personal history, investigating different aspects of their daily life (clothes, food, hygiene, games) and comparing this to their past life as a baby. Students will delve deeper, collaborating to find out what a current ‘Day in the life’ routine looks like for a Year 1 student in 2024. They will then create questions to find out what the daily routines of their family members looked like when they were in Year 1 in the past. Students will gather and compare their own information to determine which aspects of daily life have changed, and which have remained the same. Students will design a creative way to share their findings with the class.