Year 1 News
From Yolanda Andrews, Year 1A teacher
It has been a gigantic few weeks in Year 1!
To begin, the students were welcomed into Level 3 by a massive Australovenator — a true Aussie dinosaur also known as the “cheetah of its time.” Although this agile carnivore had enormous 30cm-long claws, luckily for the students it seemed far more interested in learning about other dinosaurs than hunting for prey.
Students have continued to engage enthusiastically in learning about dinosaurs throughout their Reading and Writing lessons this week. As they explored the topic further, they also strengthened and refined their writing skills, with a focus on clarity, structure, and the effective communication of ideas.
To support this learning, students have been using the Colourful Semantics approach, which uses colour-coded cues to help children build, understand, and structure sentences. By assigning colours to different parts of a sentence — such as orange for ‘who’ and yellow for verbs — grammar becomes more visual and concrete, supporting the development of both spoken and written language skills.
The Year 1 students have continued learning new addition and subtraction strategies while also practising and consolidating previously taught skills. This week, students explored the ‘Bridge to 10’ strategy, which combined earlier learning such as Part-Part-Whole and Tens Facts. It has been wonderful to see students applying these strategies and their growing understanding to solve more complex problems, while also developing greater confidence and success with mental computation.
The Year 1 students have also been exploring money, with a focus on Australian coins and combining different amounts to make $1. They thoroughly enjoyed pretending to purchase items from catalogues or transforming their classrooms into bustling shops, with bargains and deals everywhere — perhaps even rivaling the Black Friday sales!
Next week, Year 1 students will begin learning about fractions. They will explore how to find halves, quarters, and eighths of shapes and collections.
In Wellbeing, students focused on the different ways people communicate respectfully. They explored how respectful behaviour can be shown through both our words and actions, while also recognising that people from different cultures may communicate in different ways.
In Gardening, we have started visiting Errol Street to explore the wonderful garden space there. Students are learning about which seeds are ready to harvest at this time of year, as well as the types of plants that thrive in Melbourne’s winter climate.
Each class has planted its own seeds and is currently nurturing them in preparation for transferring them into the garden beds. Most classes are growing seeds from the Brassicaceae or Fabaceae families.
