Year 1/2 Mainstream
Celebrating Learning
Integrated- What we have been up to:
Last week, the 1/2s explored sound through a range of experiments. We learnt about how sound travels by vibration through air or other mediums. We felt the vibration of our vocal chords while speaking, we felt the vibrations of a phone ringing through a box, we listened to metal tapping other mental surfaces through coat hangers and we felt the vibrations of speech through a balloon! We encourage you to have a go at these experiments at home!
Maths: We have been continuing our exploration of multiplication and division with a classroom and school array hunt. Thank you to everyone who has supported the students' multiplication and division understanding by continuing the array hunt at home. Students have been able to describe these arrays and categorise using multiplicative language and thinking. We continued our unit on measuring, and students got to decorate and enter a potato into a class Potato Olympics. Sounds crazy, right? But the kids loved it! They got to enter their potato into events such as long jump, 50 metres, shot put and break dancing!
Literacy:
As Grade 1/2 classes conclude our writing focus on narrative texts, we are moving into a different way of storytelling - poetry! We were so fortunate this week to have a real life poet join our classes to show us what poetry is all about. Steph Amir, mum of Frankie in 1/2A and published poet, visited our classes to show us how to create rhythm in our poems. We all got to have a go at creating a shared poem about the things we all love or like to enjoy in our classrooms.
Thank you so much to Steph Amir for sharing your time and your craft with us. We are looking forward to creating our own poems inspired by light and sound in the upcoming weeks!
Kiaya, our literacy coach, has been supporting the 1/2 team with our new morning paired reading routine targeting reading fluency. We are teaching the students that strong readers make their reading sound like speaking. To be a fluent reader, students need to pay attention to:
| ACCURACY | I read the words correctly (sound out and say). |
| RATE | I make sure my reading isn’t too fast or too slow. |
| EXPRESSION | I read with feeling. I don’t read like a robot |
| PUNCTUATION | I follow the punctuation marks that I read in my text. |
When you are reading with your child at home, you might like to give them feedback that sounds like this:
- Your (accuracy/ rate/expression/punctuation) was _____________________.
- Your _______________ could improve by_____________________.
- Next time you might like to try ________________________.
- I noticed you tried ________________________.
As part of our phonics program, classes have begun Little Learners Love Literacy Stage 7.3 sounds. These sounds include: oo as in goose, le as in little, ow as in brown, ou as in couch, oi as in coin, oy as in boy, oo as in look, u as in put and oul as in could.
What’s to come in the next two weeks:
- On Friday September 6 we are looking forward to performing our shadow puppet retells for our families. Please join us our classrooms at 9:30 for our performances. These will celebrate our learning in Integrated and literacy this term. (If you have some powerful lighting that could help with our performances and you are willing to share, please let your classroom teacher know!)
- Over the next couple of weeks students will continue the multiplication and division journey. They will learn that multiplication and division is commutative and that they can use arrays to count collections. You can continue to look for arrays at home. Asking students to look for arrays in their homes and communities turns students’ eyes on to seeing the mathematical structures throughout their environments
- If you are interested in attending our next reading workshop (so that you can volunteer in our classrooms), please contact your classroom teacher!