Year 1/2 News

This week in Learning World 1 (LW1)

It has been an exciting and fun start back to the school year in Learning World 1! 

There is a buzz of learning and engagement throughout the classrooms as the students and teachers are building relationships and getting to know each other.  

New routines are being practised, including our use of mini-whiteboards in our Daily Reviews, to keep our new knowledge in our working memory and build our long-term memory. Your children can share with you how they: hover, chin-it and re-set to demonstrate their learning quickly to their teachers, when using a mini-whiteboard in Maths, Spelling and Grammar lessons.  

Spanish Literacy   

In Spanish, the students are learning about constructing and writing letters that contain personal descriptions. Sentences are being enhanced through descriptive language to build vocabulary eg. Yo tengo pelo marrón y largo.

You might like to ask your children some of these questions that are connected to their classroom learning:  

• ¿Cómo te llamas?
• ¿Cuántos años tienes? 
• ¿Dónde vives?

English Literacy  

In English, our focus is currently revising our correct sentence structures and learning about the organisation of Reading and Writing lessons. Some students will be learning about the use of nouns, verbs and adjectives within simple sentences, while others are building upon their knowledge and extending their written description through compound and complex sentences.  

Our Writing focus for Term 1, is using past tense in reflective writing and recounts about experiences that have taken place. We will be using experiences such as our upcoming Proactivity Incursion to build upon oral language skills to connect to and improve written descriptions.  

Maths  

Both our English and Spanish Maths lessons follow the same structure, beginning with a Daily Review of previous learning, introducing new concepts demonstrated by the teacher (we call this the ‘I Do’ phase), then working through supported examples of new learning skills (the ‘We Do’) and then students are practising with less structure and support as needed in the ‘I Do’ part of the lesson. The ‘I Do’ part of the lessons this week have involved board games and 100s charts with missing sections.   

In Year 1/2, students have 5 Maths lessons every week with 3 taught in Spanish and 2 lessons in English. These are planned with the English and Spanish teachers working closely together, ensuring our classes are aligned and connected, with a smooth transition between languages.  

All students have been demonstrating previous knowledge and exploring numbers through various counting patterns (forwards and backwards) and place value tasks, where numbers are broken into ones, tens, hundreds and thousands before analysing and re-constructing. All students have been counting by 2s, 5s, 10s, and started exploring different patterns from different starting points eg. Count by 5s, starting at 14.  

Upcoming Events 

We had a special visit this week from our 1/2A teacher Simon, where he introduced his baby son, Jude. The adoring looks from our students were gorgeous and filled with awe as they asked many questions about this little person they were meeting for the first time! Simon will be back in the classroom from Week 4.  

Keep a look out on Sentral for more information about the ProActivity visit! This incursion is all about building resilience and experiencing real-life actions that can be discussed and reflected upon in the moment. We have booked the favourite activities of last year, including the inflatable obstacle course and acrobatics skills, along with including a couple of different experiences to look forward to! This will be happening on Wednesday 24th Feb 9:00 – 11:00am, in Week 5.