Year 1/2 News
St Columba's Primary School
Year 2 has had a wonderful and busy start to the term! We have just completed our first Unit of Inquiry, and we are so proud of all the learning that has taken place.
A highlight was our recent PYP Morning, where students welcomed their parents into the classroom. The children did a fantastic job showing their organisation and collaboration skills by planning and leading a range of activities. They demonstrated confidence, teamwork and growing independence as they guided their parents through the learning experiences. It was a lovely morning enjoyed by all. Thank you to everyone who was able to attend.
We just wrapped up our Writing Unit on Launching the Writer’s Notebook, and what a powerful start it has been! Students learned that writers collect ideas from their everyday lives, pay close attention to the world around them, and see small moments as seeds for meaningful stories. Throughout the unit, students explored how to generate topics, sketch and jot observations, and develop entries that reflect their unique voices. Our Writer’s Notebooks are quickly becoming treasured spaces filled with curiosity, creativity, and growing confidence.
In Maths, we have completed our first Big Idea: Partitioning Shapes into Equal Parts. Students explored how shapes can be divided into halves, thirds and quarters, and investigated what makes parts equal. Through hands-on activities and problem-solving tasks, they developed a strong understanding of fairness and equal sharing.
Wednesday afternoons continue to be a class favourite! We look forward to Dance and PMP each week, where students build coordination, balance and confidence while having lots of fun.
Year 1
We have had a wonderful start to year 1. It has been a very busy term and we have settled into our new classrooms really well. Our first Maths Big Idea in Year 1 has been “Tens and Ones are a useful way to organise.” We have been learning how to group classroom items into tens and ones to help us count more efficiently. By working with collections of everyday objects, we have been exploring the connections between counting, organising, grouping and place value. We have discovered that grouping into tens is a much faster and more accurate way to count large collections, rather than counting by ones. This understanding is helping us build strong foundations in place value and develop confidence when working with bigger numbers.
In Writer’s Workshop, students have been learning and practising our classroom routines and procedures. This includes organising their writing materials, knowing what to do when they finish a piece of work, and adding completed writing and drawings to their folders. Students have also been learning how to take part in a peer conference, where they share their work and give helpful feedback to classmates.
We have now launched our Illustration Study. Students are learning how to draw characters, show emotions, add movement lines and create backgrounds that help bring their stories to life. They have been busy experimenting with these techniques and adding them to their own writing.
This approach encourages students to notice the details in books that make stories engaging for readers. By studying how authors and illustrators create interesting texts, students are developing independence, creativity and confidence as young writers while learning that both pictures and words help tell a story.
