From the Year 1 Classroom

What a wonderful day we had honouring our beautiful mothers, grandmothers, aunties and special women in our lives at our Mothers’ Day celebrations. Our Mothers’ Day Liturgy, shared morning tea and craft activities at school, were a wonderful way for our children to show their love and gratefulness. Our classrooms were bustling hives of activity and excitement. It was lovely seeing the smiles on the children’s faces as they went about making special gifts throughout the school. It was an especially lovely opportunity for those children with siblings in our school to be able to spend time making gifts together.

Literacy

Over the last fortnight we have been reviewing words where the ‘y’ acts like a vowel in a word making a long ‘i’ vowel sound like in cry, dry, spy etc. We will also look at this week the trigraph ‘igh’’, which also makes the long ‘i’ vowel sound. Our new phonemes are the digraphs ‘ue’ in glue and ‘ew’ in grew. We have added the words love, says, over, brother, mother, father, sister, cousin and family to our Tricky Word train and it would be wonderful to see more children practising these at home with their nightly reading. The children are becoming super word detectives as they read, identifying adjectives (describing words), nouns (naming words), verbs (action words) and homophones (words that sound the same, but have different spellings and different meanings).

We are up to the publishing stage in the writing process of our persuasive text, where we are trying to convince Mr Mullavey to have a pet pup in the school! The children have found typing this on their ipads challenging but also very rewarding. Many of them initially fell into the ‘Learning Pit’ and had to build their resilience to climb out and become successful. The Learning Pit is a tool that we have been teaching the students that clarifies to students that in order to experience deep learning, it will be difficult and it is okay to struggle. It is a picture that gives students a visual of how learning happens.

Being able to find all of the letters on a keyboard, as well as locating and applying thecapital letter, the full stop, question mark and exclamation mark buttons were all verynew learning for our students. We are proud of their ‘never give up’ and ‘I can do it’attitudes.MathsIn Maths, we have been using hundreds charts to help us find numbers that are 1 more,1 less, 10 more and 10 less than a two-digit number. We have become much moreconfident in these skills by rolling a dice to make a two digit number and then creatingnets like the images below. Some of our children challenged themselves to apply this new learning to three-digit numbers with great success!

We have also started our Measurement Unit, looking at length and mass over the pastcouple of weeks. Students have been comparing the length and mass of objects aroundthe classroom using non-formal measurements. Using the vocabulary of ‘shorter’,‘longer’, ‘heavier’ and ‘lighter’. These concepts can be fun to follow up at home, usinghands on materials looking at length and mass.

Religion

In Religion, we are learning about the story of Pentecost and talking about the HolySpirit. We have focused on the symbols of wind and fire in relation to this story and howPentecost is a very important story about the Holy Spirit. We want the children tounderstand that Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit to give us special gifts, and the Holy Spirithelps us to live like Jesus.InquiryIn Inquiry, we are learning to describe the weather and seasons. They will investigatethe concepts that different locations have different weather patterns and explore howactivities in places change according to the weather conditions. Students will then get achance to research weather patterns and create a poster to display their findings.

Class Awards

With the implementation of Magnify Sandhurst at the beginning of Term 1, we no longer run The Resilience Project lessons, therefore we do not hand out any GEM Awards at assembly like we did last year. This year, each week (when assembly takes place) each class has been asked to hand out one Student of the Week Award. Unfortunately, this does mean that not every student will receive an award every term, but we do try our best to ensure every child will receive one award each semester.

Important Dates• 

27/5/25 - National Reconciliation Week begins

29/5/25 - School Fun Run and Cross Country

6/6/25 Tabloid Sports Afternoon (No Assembly)

9/6/25 - Kings Birthday Public Holiday