Year 1

Welcome to our Classroom Communication

Specialist Timetable

Tuesday - Art with Mrs Watson.

Wednesday - Japanese with Sensei Mizushima.

Thursday - P.E. with Mr McKernan and S.T.E.M. with Mr Asquith.

SCHOOL CLOSURE DAY

Tuesday 1st April - Students DO NOT attend school this day as staff are travelling to St Brendan's in Shepparton for Professional Learning in "The Knowledge Society". 

Readers

We change our readers on a Monday or Friday. If you've missed your changing day we can change throughout the week. 

English

Over the last few weeks during our InitiaLit sessions we've explored a plethora of concepts! We've learnt about vowels and consonants. We even discovered that every syllable contains a vowel! (Y words as a vowel sound). This week we have really focused on the digraph 'ai' as in rain and 'ay' as tray. We noticed that most words with containing 'ay' are at the end of the word and the words containing 'ai' is usually in the middle of the word. 

We have enjoyed investigating compound words and have discovered we are surrounded by them. For example, classroom, toothbrush, railway, eggplant, etc.

We worked on identifying nouns in sentences and that super sentences contain nouns. We've had some fun writing with our lucky dip nouns and creating some of our own super sentences. 

We've had quite a few additions to our Useful Word Tree; could, would, should, where, were and what.

Our Storybook lessons have focused on Edwina the Emu and The Pencil. Edwina the Emu certainly had us thinking about all the different careers we can undertake in life and encouraged us to learn more about emus. We were fascinated to learn that the male emu looks after the nest of eggs rather than the female. The Pencil is new to us this week and during prediction time before we read the text we had some fantastic ideas on the different ways pencils could be used, from chopsticks, knitting needles and nose pickers, just to name a few.

Throughout our explorations we've also added some words to our Word House. These words appear in the texts we read and we learn the meaning of them. We learnt that 'perfect' means just right, 'announce' is a way of telling someone some information and  'require' means that you need something.

During handwriting we've focused on r, f and i.

Mathematics

During mathematics we've been partitioning numbers. We started with one digit numbers such as 9 and worked out some of the different we can partition these numbers into 2.

For example, 8 and 1 is a way of making 9. We also partitioned some numbers by 3. It's been fantastic to see that students are starting to learn their number facts and build on their automaticity.

This week we've been looking at number bonds up to 20 using our 10 frames. We're really getting the hang of the idea of subitising. We know that the top frame contains 10 counters so we don't really need to recount it every time we add more counters to the second frame. We'll explore the number bonds and match up what these look like using MAB blocks to help understand our place value.

Religion

We've commenced our unit on Lent in preparation for Easter. We've watched the video representation below of what it might have been like when Jesus went out in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. We certainly agreed it would have been a challenge.

We've been very interested in the story of Easter. We've used the animation below to help us understand some of the important events during Lent such as, Palm Sunday, The Last Supper, Washing of the Feet, When Jesus is arrested and we are working our way to when he was placed on the cross.

St Patrick's Day

Some of us hadn't heard of St Patrick and we were very interested to hear of his story.  Ask your child if they remember the story of St Patrick.

Inquiry 

We have commenced our new unit looking into the past. We've begun to look at artefacts left behind from the people before us. We really enjoyed a clip from Horrible Histories which helped us understand how humans used stone tools during the Stone Age. We will continue exploring the different types of artefacts throughout the ages. I am really looking forward to showing students some early technology, such as the rotary dial phone and a dot matrix printer.

We also drew what we thought living during the stone age may have been like. 

Thank you for reading our news,

Katherine & Karen