Year 1 News
Learning Celebrations
What a wonderful and fun-filled Term 3 we have had! From our Puffing Billy adventure, Pizza Day and Book Week Parade to all the learning and laughter that has happened in our classroom, it has certainly been a busy and enjoyable term.
The students have worked incredibly hard across all areas of their learning and should be very proud of the progress they have made. It has been lovely to see their confidence grow and to watch them celebrate their successes along the way.
Literacy
We have been busy learning lots of new sounds and putting them to work in our reading and spelling. Most recently, we have been exploring the different ways we can make the long ‘o’ sound, including oa, ow and o_e. The students have been practising reading and spelling words such as goat, coach, snow, throw, home, stone and woke.
We have also been learning about words such as bigger, biggest, longer and longest, and discovering how adding -er and -est can change the meaning of a word.
Reading fluently and confidently continues to be an important focus in our classroom. The students have been taking part in regular reading fluency activities, giving them opportunities to practise reading accurately, smoothly and with expression. These activities help the students become more confident and fluent readers.
Text Study
The Year 1 students have been enjoying An Anthology of Aesop’s Animal Tales by Helen Ward, which has been a lovely connection to our Unit of Inquiry, How We Express Ourselves.
We have enjoyed exploring some of Aesop’s famous fables, including Size Isn’t Everything and Steady and Slow. The students have loved discussing the lessons and messages within these stories and making connections to their own lives.
When exploring Steady and Slow, we talked about times when we have had to be patient and keep trying, even when something feels tricky at first. The students then wrote about a time when they showed persistence, making a wonderful connection to the saying, “Slow and steady wins the race.”
There have been some thoughtful conversations and fantastic writing coming from these stories. We look forward to discovering more fables together!
Maths
The students have continued to work hard and enjoy their Maths learning over the past few weeks.
We have been exploring equal groups, where the students have been learning to recognise when groups have the same number of objects and work out how many are in each group. They have then used skip counting to help find the total number of objects. This has been a great way for the students to develop their understanding of grouping and early multiplication.
We have also introduced two-digit addition, adding numbers together without needing to regroup. The students have been developing their confidence with different strategies to solve addition problems, including the split strategy, where numbers are broken into smaller parts to make calculations easier.
Alongside this, we have continued exploring halves and quarters and have been learning about area by looking at how much space a shape or surface covers. The students have enjoyed using practical activities and hands-on materials to help make these new concepts easier to understand.
It has been wonderful to see the students becoming more confident mathematicians and having a go at challenging problems!
How We Express Ourselves
Our current Unit of Inquiry, How We Express Ourselves, has been a real highlight this term. Our central idea is “People express themselves through stories.”
The students have been learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Dreaming stories, including Bunjil, Tiddalick the Frog and The Rainbow Serpent. We have enjoyed listening to these stories, talking about their messages and thinking about how stories can share important ideas, beliefs and understandings.
The students particularly enjoyed creating their own Bunjil and Rainbow Serpent posters, using pictures and words to show important parts of the stories.
We have also had lots of fun bringing stories to life! The students worked in groups to act out The Three Billy Goats Gruff and then proudly performed their stories for the Year 1 cohort. They all did such a wonderful job remembering their parts, working together and entertaining their audience — we certainly have some future little actors in Year 1!
As part of our discussions, we also explored the moral of the story and talked about how being brave, working together and using our thinking can help us overcome challenges.
The students were also so excited to share their learning at our assembly last week and did an incredible job presenting in front of the whole school. They should be extremely proud of themselves!
It has been such a pleasure watching the students grow, learn, laugh and challenge themselves throughout the term. Thank you for your continued support at home — it makes such a difference!
We hope everyone has a wonderful and well-deserved break. We can’t wait to see what Term 4 brings!