Year 1/2 

Celebrating Learning

What we have been up to: 

We are excited to be back this term! We have jumped straight into our next integrated topic for T2, “Bugs”! We have started brainstorming everything we know, think and wonder about our creepy crawly friends. We’ve explored our local neighbourhood and garden to see what kinds of bugs live in our community. 1/2 teachers have sent home a “Backyard Safari Search” for students to complete with their families about the bugs in their garden OR the bugs in their local park. 

As our trip to the museum approaches (week 3- please check compass!!), we have been thinking about appropriate, respectful and curious museum behaviour. Our 1/2s are becoming experts at walking slowly and quietly next to a partner and listening carefully to our teacher for instructions!

We have started to have weekly hang outs with our year 5/6 buddies! In the next few weeks, we will also get paired up with a big buddy who will help us with some of our learning and who will be a safe big kid in the yard for us to say hello to!

Also, just clarifying something that was passed on from our class carers to you from our last meeting:

If parents are interested in helping out with reading in the mornings (Monday- Friday), please get in touch with your classroom teacher. We will then invite interested parents to our next class carer meeting (which we will run like a workshop) later this term to give them some guidance on how we are teaching reading.

Maths:

We have continued developing our understanding of place value this term. Students have been exploring one, two and three digit numbers and learning skills such as:

-ordering numbers

-numbers that come before and after

-bridging to the nearest ten

Did you know that shapes are EVERYWHERE? We’ve been on the hunt for shapes around our schoolyard and we’ve found so many. We have even started to organise our shapes and began noticing different properties of shapes and objects such as sides, vertices and faces. 

Literacy:

As part of our phonics program, classes have continued to learn Little Learners Love Literacy Stage 7.1 sounds. These sounds include: –y as in silly, igh as in night, ie as in pie, ea as in meat, -y as in fly, and oa as in float. Students have been introduced to morphology, understanding how ‘-ing’ changes the meaning of a “doing word” to a “doing right now” word! 

E.g: I run —> I am running.

Students started off the term by writing a recount about all the fun things they did on their holidays. Students unpacked their holiday and found interesting seeds to inspire their writing, they planned and then drafted their recounts. Teachers have started to introduce re-reading our writing to check that we have included all of our sounds, we have left spaces between our words and that we are including appropriate punctuation. Our year 2s, who are familiar with the writer’s process have started to revise and edit their writing.

What’s to come in the next two weeks:

• Next week is our museum excursion! We are so excited! Make sure you check compass for event details. 
• In the coming two weeks in phonics, we will start to look at the sounds ar as in art, or as in sort and aw as in saw.
• The next text type we will look into will be information reports.
• We will have a few more weeks focussing on place value and 2D shares and 3D objects and will move into learning about addition and subtraction.