Grade 1/2 Area

The Grade 1/2 students have had an extremely busy term so far. With wonderful events like the Grade 1 Dinner, the Year 2 Sleepover, learning a new dance to Hakuna Matata and utilizing iPads in Mathematics sessions.

Maths lessons have included lots of new activities including the use of iPads to reinforce place value lessons and using number lines as a strategy for addition and subtraction.   Grade One students enjoyed making their name out of Base10 materials and calculated the value of their name.  Grade 2s explored making Place Value models and then determined to total value of their model by counting thousands, hundreds, tens and ones.  Last week, grade 1s were revising the friends of 10 by playing card games whilst the Year Two students completed their very first online PAT Maths test using chromebooks.  This week, we estimated how many actions we could do in a minute and then performed the actions such as sit ups, laps around the basketball court, push ups, writing our name in chalk. The results were surprising and students were engaged, yet tired after their lesson. We are focusing on clock times for the remainder of the week. It would be wonderful if students could continue to practise telling the time on an anolgue clock at home. (Digital clocks seem to be the most popular clock in most 1/2 households)

Writing sessions have focused on writing diary entries and using time connectives such as First, Next, Then, Finally and including feelings.  We have been learning to write compound sentences this week, which include conjunctions (joining words) such as and, but, so and because. 

Buddy Reading is proving to be enjoyable by all. Students are having fun reading out loud to a friend as well as focusing on expression and fluency.  We have been investigating the features of fiction and non-fiction text and learning the different types of genre, such as realistic fiction, fantasy, fairytales, persuasive and informational text. Vocabulary has also been a big focus in reading and students have been learning about word families and experimenting with new words by writing sentences. 

During Discovery learning, students have been learning about the 5Rs, Refuse, Reuse, Recycle and Repurpose.  Students are excited about repurposing materials. If you have any spare boxes, jars, cans, materials, plastic containers and cardboard, please send them along to school with your child.