Year 1/2 Mainstream
Celebrating Learning
Integrated- What we have been up to:
It’s nearly time for us to present our puppet shows! The 1/2s have been working really hard finishing their puppets and rehearsing their lines. We are very excited to watch the final shows.
Maths: We have been continuing to consolidate our understanding of multiplication and division with the students making an array city. They also explored measuring the surface area of a side of an object and making the link between arrays and surface area. It has been exciting to watch students make the connections and deepen their understanding.
We have also started a new Fast Facts practise on Fridays. Students get to recall addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts fluently. These are grouped into different skills. We know they have mastered a skill when they can answer 60 questions showing this skill in 5 minutes. If your child brings home a sheet, it means they haven’t yet mastered that skill, and you may want to support them in practising those facts. We have been thrilled to see how excited the children have been to master these skills. It is stressed it is NOT a competition but an opportunity to compete against ourselves.
Literacy:
Following our guest speaker spot from poet Steph Amir, Grade 1/2 children have been learning how to become poets themselves! To begin our learning about poetry, we have focused on a few different types of fun poems - acrostic poems, shape poems, cinquain poems, and diamante poems. Students have drawn inspiration from themselves, their interests, and our integrated unit topic sound and light. We will continue our literacy unit on poetry in the remaining weeks of term with haiku and free verse poetry. It has been so entertaining to read all of the fun poetry being written by Grade 1/2s!
Kiaya, our literacy coach, has been supporting the 1/2 team with our new morning paired reading routine targeting reading fluency. We are teaching the students that strong readers make their reading sound like speaking. To be a fluent reader, students need to pay attention to:
| ACCURACY | I read the words correctly (sound out and say). |
| RATE | I make sure my reading isn’t too fast or too slow. |
| EXPRESSION | I read with feeling. I don’t read like a robot |
| PUNCTUATION | I follow the punctuation marks that I read in my text. |
When you are reading with your child at home, you might like to give them feedback that sounds like this:
- Your (accuracy/ rate/expression/punctuation) was _____________________.
- Your _______________ could improve by_____________________.
- Next time you might like to try ________________________.
- I noticed you tried ________________________.
As part of our phonics program, classes have begun Little Learners Love Literacy Stage 7.4 sounds. These sounds include: a_e as in gate, e_e as in these, i_e as in kite, o_e as in cone and u_e as in huge.
What’s to come in the next two weeks:
- Students will finish off their multiplication and division journey with more division stories and multiplication games. Fast Facts will continue, so watch out for any unfinished sheets in your child’s bag and we will be starting to learn about measuring mass, volume and capacity. Cooking at home is a fun and productive way to support this learning.
- Tomorrow (Friday September 6th) we will be celebrating our learning in Integrated and literacy this term with the performances of our retell shadow puppet shows. Be sure to catch these masterpieces in your child’s classroom starting at 9:30 am.
- Our movie and pizza night is coming up on Friday the 13th! Please check the compass post for event details.
- If you are interested in attending our next reading workshop (so that you can volunteer in our classrooms), please contact your classroom teacher!