FPS Newsletter

Year 1 Spotlight

A Wonderful Start!

What a wonderful start to our year! Year 1 students have been busy getting to know their classmates, settling back to their routines and having fun at school.

 

Phonics

In our daily phonics lessons, we have been revising the graphemes and phonemes that we had learned last year, for example: sh, ch, ck, or and the double consonants zz, tt, dd, gg; as well as learning new ones.

 

Phonics is taught systematically and explicitly following this cycle:

  1. Revise – Revise using Speed Sounds and Chants cards and words.
  2. Teach – Explicitly teach new graphemes and phonemes.
  3. Practise – Plan how the children will practise this skill to reach mastery.
  4. Apply – Apply this knowledge to reading decodable stories and independent writing.
  5. Assess – Assess children to monitor their progress and inform grouping.

 

 

Maths

We have been exploring the proficiency skills we use during Maths learning time. During these sessions we are building on our Understanding, Fluency, Reasoning and Problem Solving.

 

We have begun this term with showing our understanding of numbers and counting.

 

We have thrown ourselves into understanding, like deep sea divers, in a rich hands-on task. During this task, we were investigating whole numbers, through skip counting on a hundreds chart. Our key questions to explore were:

  • What number patterns can you see?
  • What are similar or different about the patterns?

 

Here are some snapshots of our learning:

 

Below is some of our thinking, during our investigation:

  • I have discovered we can use multiplication to help us! ~ Frances, 1A
  • We counted in different colours, so we can follow our skip counting pattern! ~ Eloise O, 1A
  • My strategy is to count in twos, then fives and tens. ~ Max, 1A

 

Writing

In Writing this term, students have been sharing their experience of their weekends by writing recounts. They have begun to include time connectives in their writing, such as ‘first’, ‘then’, or ‘last’.

 

Students have also been writing narratives this term, using mentor texts to guide and shape their writing. Students are developing narratives which have a beginning, middle and end.

 

Here are some snapshots of our learning:

 

Reading

Children have been super keen to read new texts in Year 1 and change their readers. It is so important to read each night with your child and instil the love of reading. So, remind your child to bring their reading folder each day.

 

Why do you love reading?

  • I like to read new stories and learn new things. ~ Neko, 1B
  • I love stories. ~ Fiona, 1B
  • I like to see if I have a text-to-self connection. ~ Emmie, 1B

 

We have been revising the decoding strategies this term to help students with their reading and we have also been looking at comprehension strategies. Some of the comprehension strategies we’ve been looking at are predicting and visualising. Just by using clues from the text students can predict what might happen next.

 

Students listened to short passages from texts and drew what they visualised and realised we can all visualise differently.

 

Here are some visualisations of giants and pirates.

 

~ Year 1 Teachers (Chiara, Anne, Grace, Tam, Binh & Suzie) and Students