Year 1

Welcome back to Term 3. It has been fantastic to see the students return to school with smiling faces, eager attitudes, and excitement for the term ahead. We have a busy and exciting term planned, with lots of wonderful learning experiences, special events, and opportunities for our students to grow in confidence and independence.

Term 3 Overview: 

Literacy and Inquiry

As in previous terms, Literacy and Inquiry learning will continue to be integrated. This term, the inquiry topic is 'Awesome Australia', where students will celebrate First Nations Australian cultures while also exploring the Australian flag, the map of Australia, its states and territories, famous landmarks, and unique Australian animals.

Using the hybrid text Under the Southern Cross by Frane Lessac, students will journey around Australia through a narrative while discovering fascinating facts about landmarks along the way. They will identify the fiction and non-fiction features of the text and use patterned writing to create their own pieces about their favourite places in Australia.

Students will again engage with non-fiction texts to research Australian animals and create their own information reports. They will read the story of a kookaburra named Jeremy while learning about the structure of a recount. Students will also enjoy celebrating Book Week by reading and responding to the shortlisted books.

During the first few weeks of the term, students will however focus on the Australian athletes competing in the Commonwealth Games. They have already had the opportunity to participate in their own Opening Ceremony and compete in a series of mini games, including modified hockey, netball, and gymnastics activities. Throughout the Games, students will collect, tally, and graph medal results for Australia and other countries of interest, providing authentic opportunities to apply their mathematical skills.

To conclude the term, students will explore the world of poetry. They will investigate rhyme, use word families to create their own poems, experiment with alliteration, and develop their oral presentations skills, using expression and fluency to read their poems aloud.

MSL

This term, students will continue to participate in MSL (Multi-Sensory Language) lessons three times a week. These structured lessons are designed to reinforce and consolidate previously taught concepts, helping students build confidence and develop strong foundational literacy skills through explicit, multisensory instruction.

Throughout the term, students will learn and review a range of spelling rules and phonics patterns, including:

• Gentle Cindy
• 3 sounds of ‘ea’: Eat Bread and Steak
• au/aw: Raw sauce
• ew (oo/yoo): you blew on my stew 
• plurals 
• s says /z/: Smell the rose with my nose 
• eigh quadgraph 
• Present tense suffixes: -s/-es/-ies
• Homophones: same sound, different spelling 
• Compound words 

These spelling patterns will support students in becoming more confident readers and writers, as they learn to recognise and apply these rules in their everyday learning.

Maths

This term in Mathematics, we will continue building students' understanding of addition while introducing subtraction. Alongside our number work, students will also explore measurement through units on length, money and mass, as well as learning how to collect, represent and interpret data using graphs.

Our addition lessons will continue to focus on developing deep number knowledge rather than simply memorising facts. Students will investigate doubles, near doubles, combinations that make 10 and combinations that make 9, using these relationships to solve increasingly complex problems. By exploring how numbers can be broken apart and recombined in different ways, students are developing a thorough understanding of all numbers to 20 and becoming more flexible and efficient mathematicians.

A strong emphasis this term will be on developing students' mathematical reasoning. We want children to understand why a strategy works, rather than relying on memorised answers or following procedures without understanding. Students will be encouraged to explain their thinking, justify their strategies and make connections between different number facts.

Hands-on learning will continue to be an important part of our Mathematics program. Students will regularly use concrete materials such as counters, blocks and ten frames to build visual images of number relationships before moving to more abstract representations. This approach helps students develop confidence, deepen their conceptual understanding and apply their knowledge when solving a wide variety of mathematical problems.

NAIDOC Week:

To celebrate NAIDOC Week, Year 1 explored Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures through stories, discussions and creative activities.

We read Respect by Aunty Fay Muir and Sue Lawson and discussed what respect looks like in our everyday lives. Together, we shared ways we can show respect to the land, animals, our families, friends and ourselves. Some of our wonderful student responses included:

• Amara: Listening when others are speaking.
• Nicolas: Including others.
• Olivia: Doing your 5 L's.
• Adele: Putting your rubbish in the bin to keep the animals safe.
• Ava: Eating healthy food.
• Stella: Watering the plants.

We also read Little Bird's Day by Sally Morgan and explored how Little Bird responds to the environment. Students learnt how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have long observed the animals, weather, sky and land to understand and care for Country. We discovered that signs in nature, such as the sounds of birds or the position of the sun, can tell us about the time of day and changes in the environment.

As part of our learning, students completed a writing activity about the stories, practised their fine motor skills by creating Aboriginal-inspired symbols used in storytelling, and enjoyed expressing their understanding through artwork.

Fine Motor:

Aboriginal symbols used in story telling

Important Dates 

Thursday 6th August: Moonlit Sanctuary Excursion

Dates TBC: Upcoming Book Week Events in August 

Week of Monday 7th and Monday 14th September: School Swimming

Friday 18th September: End of Term 3