Year 1 Spotlight

In Year 1 we have been using mentor texts, such as Paper Dolls (by Julia Donaldson) and The Great Rabbit Chase (by Freya Blackwood) to help us develop our writing skills. Inspired by Julia Donaldson’s book, we made colourful paper dolls and developed them into characters for our writing. We enjoyed developing descriptive language skills to name and describe our paper doll characters. The unexpected and delightful beginning to The Great Rabbit Chase (where Mum went out to buy gumboots but came home with a rabbit!) has helped us develop our skills at grabbing the reader’s attention by starting our writing with a bold beginning and using transition words (such as first, next, then) to guide the reader through our writing.

There was a lot of excitement in our classrooms in maths this term during our unit on money. Our classrooms became little marketplaces as we bought and sold food products that we had drawn on paper. We loved having the agency to decide what products to sell in our shops. The mini marketplace in our classrooms gave us practical experience using Australian currency. Practice buying and selling products helped us develop our addition, subtraction and skip counting skills.

“Now I understand how a shop works. If I sell products I make money. I can then buy things.”

There was also a lot of enthusiasm in our lunch order lessons. We looked at Mr Brightside lunch order menus, created our own lunch orders on brown paper bags and calculated the cost.

“Wow, lunch is expensive!”

The focus on food products in our maths lessons connects to our Farm to Fork topic in inquiry. In this topic, we have been looking at where food comes from and the changes that food goes through before it comes to us. We have investigated where milk comes from, how wheat grows, how bread is made and have created flow chart diagrams showing these processes. There has been a lot of curiosity and engaged discussions in our classrooms as we investigated these processes. We took our curiosity with us on an excursion to Myuna Farm to experience farm processes firsthand, where we saw and engaged with different animals and learnt more about milk production by milking a goat.

We love the curiosity that Year 1 has brought to these topics. We’re looking forward to more great learning opportunities in the terms ahead.