Year One News 

Dear Year One families, 

Welcome back to the final weeks of Term Four! We are so happy to have everyone back onsite full time. We have spent time over the past couple of weeks ensuring that we are having discussions with the children about how they feel returning to school and working on our wellbeing. We are very proud of the students for being so eager to return and get straight back into their learning.  

Happy Diwali to all of the families who have celebrated over the past week. The students at school also spent some time learning about the meaning of Diwali and creating their own Rangoli art works outside. 

Unit of Inquiry 

In our fifth and final Unit of Inquiry for the year, the students have been unpacking the Central Idea, ‘The migration of cultures has shaped Australia’. Students worked on the meaning of the words and what they want to learn in this unit. We look forward to spending the next few weeks researching the wonderings the students created in response to this investigation and discussion. All Year One students engaged in a Provocation Day where the students had some time to research their culture. They then created a picture of themselves, drawing things that they felt represented who they are. We will continue to be open-minded learners as we talk about Australia and the many cultures we have in our country.  

Reading 

In Reading we have been looking at different fairy tales. We have explored the different versions of fairy tales and how they have similarities and differences. The students have enjoyed exploring characters and writing inside and outside character traits in a story. We have also been working on writing retells of fairy tales, showing our understanding of the features in a narrative such as the characters, setting, problem and solution. Understanding how to find these in the story helps us to write our own innovations on these texts.  

Writing 

In a connection with our Reading work, we have been using our Writing lessons to expand on our ideas of different narratives to write our own stories. We have spent time exploring characters the students want to write about, the settings our stories take place in, an interesting problem and a solution at the end. We have looked into creating a ‘sizzling start’ to our stories, using things we have learnt such as onomatopoeia, dialogue or an action to hook the reader into reading our narrative.  

Maths 

We are continuing to work on learning about time at the moment, working on what an analogue clock is and how to read it. We have explored the numbers and hands on a clock and what they are there for. The students have been looking at what we can do in one second, one minute and one hour. They have given examples such as: in one second we can blink, in one minute we can jump up and down a few times and in an hour we can complete a lesson at school. Many classes have drawn clock faces in chalk outside, looking at writing time to the hour and half hour, engaging in discussions about how a clock should look and how the hands show the time. Students have also explored measurement, looking at how they can measure their peers with items in the room such as blocks, glue sticks or markers. In using these items, the students were able to explore informal units of measurement.  

Kind regards,

The Year One Team