From the 1/2 Classrooms

We have had another busy fortnight in the Grade 1 & 2 classrooms! Our Creativity unit, Robot Buddies, is well underway and what perfect timing with the Melbourne Cup holiday to make fascinators and hats. Students enjoyed getting the craft materials out to ‘create, imagine and innovate to design a fascinator or hat’. Check out the designing and creating process below and our end products. Some future milliners and hatters in our mix we think!

Maths

We have been continuing to revise place value, with a focus on partitioning into ones, tens, hundreds, further developing our quick recall facts of friends of 20 and building our confidence with skip counting and number patterns. We have been starting each session with maths retrieval; these sessions have allowed for rich discussions to take place in the class and for students to share their thoughts and ideas. Here are some examples of questions we have discussed:

We have also begun to use the Peter Liljedahl ‘Building Thinking Classrooms’ approach in some of our Maths sessions. Students were randomly placed into groups, assigned a whiteboard around the room where they are to stand, collaborate with their groups and record responses to the question posed. After the time duration is up, students gathered around some of the boards, as directed by the teacher, and engaged in discussions around what each group had responded with. Students loved seeing the different ideas and thinking of the other groups. It was particularly inspiring to see some groups apply strategies shared by other groups when answering the next question.

We are now moving into additive thinking. We will be revising strategies used to add and subtract a number such as jump strategy, compensation strategy and partitioning strategy. 

Production

We were so excited to finally see all our students perform in our whole school production, ‘The Amazing Adventures of Superstan’ this week. Students had a big day of rehearsals at ‘The Round’ during the day, following by the production in the evening. We are so proud of all our students, for many of them, performing in their first production. They were brave, confident and super cute to watch! Here is some behind the scenes pictures we took throughout the day.

We can't believe we are over half way through term 4, looking forward to a jam-packed second half of the term!

Team 1/2 teachers